A Medico-Economic Evaluation of a Telehealth Platform for Elective Outpatient Surgeries: a Trial Study

Outpatient surgery allows the patient to leave the hospital on the day of their surgery and thus avoid complete hospitalization. There are many advantages to this practice. Patients can remain in the comfort of their own home with the support of their family caregivers and the healthcare system can avoid incurring additional hospital costs and redirect these savings to other critical needs. However, despite the advantages of outpatient surgery, the tools and measures currently in place to supervise the preparation before the operation and the follow-up after the operation are suboptimal.

Following surgery, adverse events such as moderate to severe pain, nausea/vomiting, infection and bleeding from the operative site are very rarely sought out and detected by healthcare facilities. However, these are the main causes of readmissions or emergency consultations for patients.

In order to optimize the care offer, the anesthesiology department, the innovation and artificial intelligence center of the CHUM as well as the Quebec telecare platform LeoMed have joined forces in order to offer, through a health application, follow-up and personalized support for patients undergoing outpatient surgery.

The investigators believe that the integration of this platform in the course of care will allow early diagnosis of the main postoperative complications and therefore, prevent calls to the Health-Info line, emergency room returns, as well as readmissions or unscheduled postoperative consultations.

A patient-as-partner approach has been chosen in the initial phase, where 12 patients having had an outpatient surgery less than 6 months ago, will be recruited to test the platform. Another 12 patients, scheduled to undergo an outpatient surgery, will test the optimized support and follow up application. Their feedback will help to correct and/or improve the platform, if necessary.