Telehealth Home-monitoring for Frailty in Cardiac Surgery (THE-FACS)

Cardiac surgical interventions are increasingly offered to vulnerable patients or patients living with frailty. Unfortunately, frailty has been shown to be an independent predictor of poorer outcome and increased health care resources in terms of readmission to hospital or visit to the ER after discharge. We hypothesize that the use of a comprehensive Telehealth home-monitoring program could reduce emergency room visits and re-hospitalization after heart surgery.

Frailty in all patients will be determined using the Edmonton frailty scale (EFS) as is part of the current standard of care for all patients at the NBHC since 2018. We plan to implement the Telehealth intervention on all 120 consecutively enrolled patients identified as vulnerable and/or frail and discharged from hospital within 10 days of their surgery. The primary outcome of interest will be rates of ER visit and readmission to hospital within 30 days of discharge compared to propensity score matched historical control patients. A power calculation suggests that 120 patients per group are necessary explaining why the intervention group will be 120 patients. We chose to compare our intervention to a matched group of 240 individuals from historical data which already captures follows patients 30 days after surgery but is limited in its Telehealth intervention. Duration of the study is 12 months.