Solutions for Home-Based Surgical Recovery

Problem and Need for the Study

Emergency general surgical procedures account for a significant proportion of hospital admissions, complications, and mortalities. Among these, patients undergoing emergency laparotomies—a type of abdominal surgery—experience some of the worst outcomes.

Home-based surgical recovery is an especially vulnerable period, as patients often face significant physiologic changes and receive fragmented care. While enhanced recovery programs have successfully improved patient outcomes in preoperative and acute settings, recovery in the home environment remains understudied and presents a significant opportunity for improvement.

Innovation and Impact

Our goal is to design innovative solutions, including technology in patient recovery, to improve emergency laparotomy outcomes during the home recovery phase. We will design solutions with a systems engineering approach and utilize existing tools and workflows where possible. While emergency laparotomy patients are the focus, we expect that some solutions will be applicable to broader populations of patients.

To achieve our goal, we will identify barriers to ideal home-based surgical recovery and develop tools and processes that remove or reduce these obstacles. Promising solutions will be implemented and evaluated at one or both of our partner clinical sites: M Health Fairview and University of California San Francisco.