Cardiac Enhanced Recovery After Surgery: Early Outcomes in a Community Setting.

Abstract Background Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) programs have demonstrated improved outcomes in non-cardiac surgery. More recently, ERAS has been applied to cardiac surgery with promising results. We have implemented cardiac ERAS at our community-based program, aiming to improve all phases of care, and now report our early results. Methods We retrospectively analyzed 73 consecutive patients treated with ERAS care compared to 74 patients treated prior to implementing ERAS. Our ERAS program consisted of 6 perioperative care bundles including enhanced patient education, shortened preoperative fasting period and oral carbohydrate load, postoperative nausea prophylaxis, multimodal opioid-sparing analgesia, early extubation, and early mobilization. Results ERAS patients required significantly less opioids captured as total milligram morphine equivalents (MME; median: 35.0 versus 75.3, P Conclusions Cardiac ERAS significantly decreased opioid use, nausea, lightheadedness and improved functional outcome for cardiac surgical patients in a community hospital.