Background: Enhanced recovery after colon surgery has not been widely adopted in the United States and Europe, despite evidence that postoperative complications and hospital length of stay are decreased.
Objective: We sought to evaluate the introduction of a comprehensive care process for enhanced recovery after colon surgery in 8 community hospitals.
Design: A system-wide, surgeon-directed, multidisciplinary committee developed a comprehensive enhanced-care quality-improvement program. Surgeons and operations leaders in each hospital developed the internal structure to implement the process.
Patients: Surgeons had the option of entering or not entering patients in the enhanced-care pathway. Other than trauma patients, there were no exclusion criteria.
Main outcome measures: To limit selection bias, the study population included all patients undergoing colon resections (those entered and not entered in the care process). Length of stay, postoperative days, hospital costs, 30-day readmission rate, and return to surgery for the study population were compared with a 2-year historical baseline.
Results: Forty-two percent of the study population was entered in the enhanced-care process. The average length of stay and the number of postoperative days in the study population decreased by 1.5 (P < .0001) and 1.3 (P < .0001) days. The rate of readmissions and returns to surgery remained stable (P > .05), and the average hospital cost decreased by $1763 (P = .02). Generalized linear regression analysis demonstrated that the enhanced-care process was a more significant variable than was the surgical approach (laparoscopic vs open surgery) in decreasing length of stay.
Limitations: The degree of compliance with care process elements and the relative contribution of each element of the care process are unknown.
Conclusions: A comprehensive enhanced-care colon surgery care process was successfully introduced in a community hospital system, as indicated by the clinical outcome measures.