Post by NovaNav

What Surgeons Actually See When the Patient Goes Home Most perioperative technology investment goes into the OR. Image overlays, robotic platforms, intraoperative nerve identification. The surgical suite gets smarter every year. What happens after discharge largely stays the same: a stack of paper instructions, a phone number for the on-call service, and a patient trying to remember what the nurse said while they were still coming out of anesthesia. Dr. Robert M. Cunningham, MB BCh BAO, MRCS, MPH, FACS, DABOM, a fellowship-trained bariatric and metabolic surgeon who built a program from scratch at Methodist Jenny Edmondson in Council Bluffs, Iowa, made a point worth sitting with. His first post-op coordinator called patients every single day after surgery. Not because the system required it. Because the data supports it, and because the gaps in that first week to ten days are where dehydration, wound complications, and avoidable ED visits actually happen. That coordinator was there for the pre-op workup, was in the OR for the cases, and was the first voice patients heard after they got home. The outcome: two patients, 120 pounds combined lost in three months, zero complications, and a care team that knew what was happening in real time. This is not a technology story. It is a workflow story. The question worth asking at the system level is what percentage of your post-op phone volume is patients asking questions that were already answered in discharge paperwork nobody retained. And then asking what it would take to route that triage earlier, more consistently, and without burning out the humans doing it. The platforms being built to close this gap are not replacing the coordinator. They are making it possible for one coordinator to function at the level of ten. #PatientExperience #HealthcareInnovation #HealthcareProviders #AIHealthcare #PerioperativeCare #CareCoordination #ReadmissionReduction #OperationalExcellence

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