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Determine the Surgical Technical Success
Flow measurements either confirm your visual assessment or prompt you to reassess your work while the patient is still in the operating room. Adequate pressure but a lower-than-expected flow often indicates a technical error. Catching these errors helps avert early complications and re-operations.
Determine the Surgical Functional Success
Functional success requires physiological measurements. Are all the grafts operational? Is organ flow adequate? In surgeries where the restoration of flow is primary, flow must be measured to determine functional success.
Improve the Standard of Care
As surgical complexity increases, so does the need for intraoperative flow measurement and documentation for the patient record.
- Direct flow mesurement becomes imperative to confirming anastomotic patency, particularly in procedures where one cannot palpate vessels for a qualitative assessment of the surgical repair.
- When cardiac stents fail, CABG surgery is indicated and graft flows are critical.
- In surgeries such as partial liver transplant, flow and ratios between flows are crucial to surgical success.
- Flow measurement provides physiological parameters that help validate new surgical protocols.
Flow Measurements Complement Pressure Measurements
Flow is a quintessential vital sign. Pressure is a parameter that is adjusted by the body to control flow. An abnormal blood pressure may be tolerated by the body for prolonged periods, but an abnormal blood flow damage organ health immediately. Pressure divided by flow is equal to organ impedance, an important parameter for (a) detection of technical error in an anastomosis which would make the vascular impedance look unreasonably high, (b) selection of follow-up patient treatment regimens.
Document Surgical Success
The phasic flow printout completes your patient’s operative record. It provides conclusive evidence of surgical success to the patient’s attending physician, and the hospital’s quality and risk management professionals.
Get baseline measurements for follow-up post-surgical care
Blood flow measurements also help get an accurate long-term prognosis that impacts the treatment regimens during recovery and thereafter. Intraoperative measurement of flow parameters may avoid post-surgical tests such as an intraoperative angiogram.
Enjoy Peace of Mind
Especially in procedures where there is risk for severe functional complications, such as an intraopertive stroke, measurement and correction of these flow limitations ensures the functional success of the surgery. You can leave the OR confident that you have done the best possible for the patient whose health and well-being has been entrusted to your skills and care.
Surgical Resident Training
Why surgical residents acquire proficiency by performing many surgeries, the onus of any surgical error falls on the Chief of Surgery. When the Chief demands the intraoperative use of quality measurement devices (i.e. Flowmeter), they not only confirm the quality of surgical repairs, but transform residents into skillful surgeons who correct and learn from their mistakes.
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