Presentation description

Carotid artery stenosis is an atherosclerotic disease that increases with age. This disease is caused by the accumulation of plaque within the carotid artery which is known to lead to ischemic stroke. Stroke is the leading cause of long-term disability in older adults, with more than 200,000 instances caused by carotid artery disease every year. Carotid artery disease is treated by a multi-disciplinary approach involving intensive medical management and open endovascular surgery with the purpose of preventing future strokes.
As the population continues to age, vascular surgeons are projected only to meet 64% of the carotid artery disease surgery demand by 2036. As a result, a common set of methods to better coordinate patient centered care and decision-making will be necessary to meet the demands. The objective of this project is to consider patient reported outcome measures (PROM) to increase quality of care and better the PROM's used. PROMs enable providers to understand and communicate what matters most to individuals, regardless of the physician's preferences.
To conduct this research, we collected data from patient surveys before and after carotid artery enterectomy (CEA) and trans-carotid artery revascularization (TCAR) surgeries. These include questions on patients' everyday activities and overall health resulting in scores. Scores collected included general health, current health, physical function, and several others.
The data collected suggested that there was an average positive increase in (PROM) scores post-surgery of patients that completed a survey before and after surgery. The quantity of undetermined results suggested that there is still much that can be improved to optimize the usefulness of (PROM) scores for patient quality of care.