Liver Transplant Patients Can Avoid Costly Stay in ICU after Surgery - Mayo Clinic

studies actually unique and we explained a unique way of patient care and liver transplant patients our program started in 1998 early on we recognized that some patients are well enough even though they need a liver transplant and they don't need to go to the intensive care unit in the rest of the world in any other transplant program to the best of my knowledge liver transplant patients go to the intensive care unit after liver transplantation after we realize that some patients are healthy enough we decide to change the way we treat these patients and we identified a subgroup of patients who can bypass the intensive care unit altogether so these patients after the liver transplantation just like any other surgical patient they go to the recovery room they recover from the anesthesia there are liberated from the ventilator and then they go to a normal surgical ward this finding is actually a two piece study and the first piece which was published approximately two years ago we looked at our results and we identified certain groups of patients and when we looked at the data approximately 55% of our patients we were able to bypass the ICU altogether in the second study we decide to look at some objective criteria how we can move forward and identify these patients objectively at the time of transplant previously this decision whether to send a patient to the intensive care unit or what we call a fast track bypassing the ICU was essentially up to the attending surgeon of the case and anesthesiologist of the case it was more of a subjective decision with the second study our aim was to find an objective way of doing that so perhaps other programs who are interested in this kind of patient care can use these criteria so their patients can also benefit from this approach bypassing the intensive care unit years not exposing your patients to the intensive care unit environment with the resistant bugs with prevention avoiding the ventilator staying on the ventilator and also intensive care unit is very costly every time you step into the intensive care unit that you spend a lot of resources not just for your patients also there's a halo effect for the other services that uses the intensive care unit so this has very strong implications of resource utilization