Echocardiography Management for Patients Requiring Care for Non-Cardiac Surgery (EGHEM)

The growing population of University of Nebraska Medical Center patients with heart failure combined with the increasing number of surgical procedures performed each year supports the need for a critical analysis of how to most appropriately manage these patients during the perioperative period, especially for non-cardiac surgery. Echo-guided hemodynamic management (EGHEM) is the use of echocardiography data to normalize and/or optimize in real-time, cardiac output and ventricular filling pressures in the perioperative period for non-cardiac surgical cases. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that EGHEM compared to standard management practices will result in a reduced length of hospital stay in the noncardiac surgery population. The primary goal of health care providers for patients requiring anesthetic care, perioperative care, or critical care is ensuring the adequacy of the patient's circulatory function by optimizing cardiac output and ventricular filling pressure. Currently, the use of the ECG monitor and systemic blood pressure are the standard of care for assessing circulatory function. However, those data cannot provide accurate information on cardiac output and ventricular filling pressure for patients with cardiovascular risk factors and/or comorbidities. As a result, managing the hemodynamic parameters of these patients, as well as their intravenous fluid needs and resuscitation strategy, we hypothesize that using traditional approaches may lead to significant volume overload and post-operative cardiovascular complications and morbidity. In this study we propose an EGHEM strategy that incorporates standard echocardiography generated data points in addition to the systemic blood pressure and ECG signal to assess, manage, modify and optimize patient cardiac preload, afterload, heart rate and contractility in the perioperative period. Based on our initial observations and preliminary data using the EGHEM approach, we hypothesize that we can demonstrate a significant decrease in hospital length of stay and an overall decrease in perioperative morbidity at 30 days in the non-cardiac surgery population using EGHEM compared to standard practices. In this proposal we have designed a single center, prospective, randomized clinical trial to test our hypothesis.