Streamlining Bariatric Surgery: The Importance of Efficient Preoperative Assessment

Bariatric surgery offers life-changing benefits for patients struggling with obesity, but the journey to surgery involves a rigorous and complex preoperative assessment process that is exhausting for patients and requires significant time and resources from surgeons’ offices.This process, while crucial for patient safety and optimal outcomes, presents significant challenges for bariatric programs, straining staff resources and limiting program growth. 

The Demanding Path to Surgery: Understanding the Preoperative Journey

Preparing a patient for bariatric surgery is far from a simple checklist; it’s a multi-faceted endeavor demanding meticulous coordination and patient optimization. Before a patient is ready for surgery, they must typically undergo a series of crucial steps:

1. Comprehensive Medical Evaluation: This involves extensive lab work, cardiac assessments, pulmonary function tests, and screenings for conditions like sleep apnea. The goal is to identify and optimize any co-morbidities (such as diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease) that could increase perioperative risk.
2. Psychological Assessment: A mental health professional evaluates the patient’s readiness for surgery, assesses their understanding of the lifestyle changes required, and screens for any underlying psychological conditions that could impact adherence to the post-operative plan.
3. Nutritional Counseling: Patients work with dietitians to adopt new eating habits, often starting with a pre-operative diet (sometimes liquid) to optimize pre-operative nutritional health and promote initial weight loss. They learn about portion control, nutrient absorption, and the critical need for lifelong vitamin supplementation.
4. Lifestyle Modifications: Beyond diet, patients are typically encouraged to increase physical activity and demonstrate a commitment to long-term behavioral changes. They also may need to adjust or stop medications days or weeks before surgery
5. Multidisciplinary Consultations: Patients frequently need appointments with various specialists, including cardiologists, pulmonologists, endocrinologists, and behavioral health providers, all of whom must clear the patient for surgery.

If any of these steps are missed or not done correctly, surgery could be delayed or patients may not achieve optimal outcomes. 

This intensive, multi-step process often leads to significant operational hurdles for bariatric programs.

• Coordination Nightmares: Scheduling and tracking appointments with numerous specialists across different departments or even external facilities becomes a manual, labor-intensive task. This often leads to fragmented communication, missed appointments, and frustrating delays.
• High Administrative Burden: Program staff spend countless hours on phone calls, follow-ups, documentation, and managing patient progress, diverting valuable resources from direct patient care. This administrative load limits the program’s capacity to take on more patients, limits staff’s ability to optimize patients in time for their scheduled surgery, and contributes to burnout for already overwhelmed nursing teams.
• Patient Drop-off and Disengagement: The lengthy and sometimes overwhelming preoperative journey can lead to patient frustration, disengagement, and even drop-off from the program before surgery. 
• Limited Scalability: As demand for bariatric surgery increases, these manual processes become a bottleneck, limiting a program’s ability to grow and serve more patients efficiently without compromising quality.

It’s time for modernized PAT processes

Using AI, machine learning, and a deep understanding of clinical workflows, Qventus’ Perioperative Care Coordination Solution gives every PAT team member their own admin – offering a comprehensive solution to streamline and optimize the preoperative assessment process. By providing PAT nurses with AI assistants that can communicate directly with patients, understand and analyze documents, and handle administrative tasks; PAT teams can focus their efforts on direct patient care and increase productivity by 50%. 

Here’s how modernizing your PAT process with Qventus’ AI Teammates can transform your bariatric practice:

Streamlined Coordination of Multidisciplinary Providers

Qventus’ AI Teammates can work directly with patients to schedule and manage their appointments with specialists. This improves operational efficiency and ensures patients are on track to complete the necessary pre-surgical evaluations, and reduces scheduling conflicts, missed appointments, and delays. 

Standardized and Consistent Patient Optimization

Bariatric procedures inherently require comprehensive patient optimization, given their elective nature and common patient co-morbidities. Qventus’ AI Teammates analyze all available patient information, continuously evaluating patient-specific risk throughout the process, enabling care teams to proactively intervene if a patient’s risk increases. High-risk patients can be flagged for additional hands-on support, while lower risk patients can have large portions of their care managed by the AI Teammates. Standardizing preoperative processes and flagging patient-specific risk ensures all patients achieve consistent, high-quality optimization while prioritizing staff resources appropriately.

Reduced Costs and Staffing Burden

Typically, it takes significant personnel and financial resources to maintain rigorous bariatric optimization processes for all patients. The Perioperative Care Coordination Solution significantly decreases the resources required by eliminating manual tasks and allowing PAT staff to better prioritize their time. AI-powered Patient Optimization and Concierge services automate patient engagement, reducing staff workload while maintaining quality. This allows   our valuable human resources to focus on direct patient care – enabling you to devote staff resources to the patients that need them most.

Scalable Growth and Expansion

Qventus supports the growth of bariatric programs, whether newly established or nationally recognized Centers of Excellence. It facilitates unfettered expansion by efficiently managing higher patient volumes without compromising the quality or intensity of preoperative preparation. This empowers programs to confidently extend their reach and patient base.

Improved Outcomes and CMS Alignment

Optimized bariatric patients consistently achieve superior outcomes with fewer complications and faster recoveries. This directly impacts CMS quality metrics, including complication rates, readmissions, patient satisfaction, and overall clinical performance. Qventus positions bariatric programs to succeed under value-based payment models and evolving regulatory requirements.

By using AI to automate manual tasks, streamline patient communication, and flag high-risk patients, your PAT staff will be able to better prioritize their time to top-of-license activities that drive optimal patient outcomes. Reducing staff burden and ensuring all patients are optimized for surgery leads to better outcomes and scalable program growth. 

Contact us today if you’re ready to modernize your PAT processes with AI.