Telemedicine in Cardiac Surgery: A Pilot Study

Telemedicine has been widely used in managing patients with neurologic disorders or mental illness. Telemedicine is defined as the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications for the health and education of the patient or healthcare provider and for the purpose of improving patient care. According to our knowledge, it has not been used to manage cardiac patients who need postoperative care after discharge from hospitals. The use of telemedicine has the potential to reduce the cost of unnecessary travel by assessing the patient's postoperative status prior to making decisions as to whether or not a face-to-face consultation is necessary. In this pilot study we will compare the accuracy of surgeons' decisions during follow-up visits via video-teleconference (V-Visit) to surgeons' decisions during traditional face-to-face follow-up visits (FTF-Visits). Both the V-Visit and the FTF-Visit will take place at the Houston Michael E DeBakey VA Medical Center on the same day. We will also ask both patients and providers to complete short questionnaires after each V-Visit regarding their acceptability of using telemedicine for these post-operative follow-up visits. Information collected as part of this pilot study will be used to design a future full randomized controlled trial (RCT) on the use of telemedicine in evaluating post-operative cardiac surgical patients.