Our pre-op evaluation method combines the latest guidelines and tools to help you avoid unnecessary testing and complete the process in one visit.
About 27 million Americans undergo surgery every year and before doing so, they turn to you—their primary care physician—or their cardiologist for a preoperative evaluation. Of course, the goal of this evaluation is to determine an individual patient’s risk and compare it to procedural averages in an effort to identify opportunities for risk mitigation. But the preoperative evaluation is also an opportunity to make recommendations regarding preoperative management of medications. And certainly we want to conduct these evaluations in a way that is both expeditious and in keeping with the latest guidelines.
Current guidelines for preoperative evaluations are less complicated than they used to be and focus on cardiac and pulmonary risk stratification. While a risk calculator remains your primary tool, elements such as smoking cessation and identifying sleep apnea are important parts of the pre-op equation. In the review that follows, we present a simple algorithm that we developed that can be completed in a single visit.
The goal of the preoperative clearance (Preoperative medical assessment) is to assess the patient’s general medical condition in order to identify any unrecognized co-morbid diseases and optimize the patient’s state for the procedure. The preoperative medical assessment helps the doctors to decide if the patient is suitable for the proposed surgery according to the patient’s risk category, also it helps them to identify the factors that may reduce the patient’s risk for complications and provide the best possible recommendations for the post-operative care. Preoperative clearance usually starts by identifying the type of surgery to be performed and the risk category of the patient who needs this surgery.