What is ERAS?

ERAS (Enhanced Recovery After Surgery) is a care pathway for a specific procedure that includes a set of pre-determined activities, rules, and guidance. The purpose of these ERAS pathways is to expedite and enhance recovery after surgeries.

Hey all, welcome back to Buddy Healthcare’s blog! We are pleased that we have raised so much interest towards our blog. If this is your first time here, please have a look at the previous posts about our company and the BuddyCare solution that we’ve developed. Today we’ll discuss ERAS and why it’s important for our field. You might not find the answer in Google, so we better explain it here.

ERAS (Enhanced Recovery After Surgery) is a care pathway for a specific procedure that includes a set of pre-determined activities, rules, and guidance. The purpose of these ERAS pathways is to expedite and enhance recovery after surgeries. However, ERAS does not only focus on what happens after the surgery but also before. Thus, it focuses on the whole perioperative care and puts patients in the center of their own experience. This, again, means that ERAS aims to help run things as “normal” as possible before and after the procedure.

The following table summarizes what ERAS is all about and what components are included in the surgery process:

Pre-Intra-Post-ERAS

 

This might sound like a straightforward process, but implementing ERAS pathways requires utmost patient communication and education. The quality of communication and education varies a lot between hospitals and care teams. Furthermore, patients rarely visit the hospital many times before the surgery and thus, they need to be provided with information remotely, at home. Third, these protocols don’t consider the patient’s personal needs, characteristics and requirements in adopting new information.

On the care provider side, staff don’t have the means to track patients’ adherence to these pathways. Full and successful implementation requires engaging, motivating and activating patients not only during the appointments but also at home.

There is a scientific background for ERAS and evidence about the effectiveness of these pathways, check more here, here and here (the links contain power points that will be automatically downloaded). For Buddy Healthcare, these optimized pathways provide an intriguing opportunity. What if the BuddyCare solution is used to make sure that patients are on the best possible track by comparing their care pathways utilizing data analytics? This is one of our ideas that might be implemented in the future.

Click here to learn more about the BuddyCare Care Coordination Platform, which enhances surgery patients' recovery after surgery through digital patient engagement and remote patient monitoring. 

The BuddyCare Platform is specialized in automating the hospital care team's care coordination and patient communication processes. Patients are guided pre and post-operatively via mobile app. Simultaneously, the care team can monitor patients' progress and activities at a glance through a clinical monitoring dashboard and collect data such as PROMs/PREMs.

Thanks for joining us again! In the next post, we’ll tell you more about what these pathways mean to us and surgical patients. Please share your thoughts below and stay tuned. Cheers!