Education Meets TikTok: Cardiac Surgeons Teach Patient Recovery in New Ways

COPENHAGEN, Denmark—The key to improving postprocedural outcomes among cardiac surgery patients might be found—of all places—on social media.

“I felt crazy as a senior cardiac surgeon making TikTok videos,” said Daniel T. Engelman, MD (Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, MA), during a presentation at the 2025 European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery meeting. “But it turns out that’s what people watch. They sit on their phones and watch this stuff all day, and they want the message in one minute, it turns out, or less.”

The enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) movement, formally adopted by cardiac surgeons in 2018, has been slowly creeping into ORs across the US and Europe, with data showing that it can significantly reduce postsurgical complications and hospital stays without increasing readmissions or adverse outcomes. Hospital ERAS protocols vary, though they generally prioritize patient education, infection prevention, reduced reliance on sedation and ventilation, limited opioids, and early mobilization and equipment removal.

It can be difficult for institutions to create and follow through with all these initiatives on their own. To address this, Engelman, who serves as president of the ERAS Cardiac Society, told TCTMD about the group’s initiative to create and publish 100 different short videos covering every question a patient might have before, during, and after of cardiac surgery.

The first three videos, reminiscent of reels offering tips on how to roll the perfect pie crust or take frame-worthy photos of children, feature Engelman as well as others involved in promoting ERAS alongside bold visuals. So far they have released segments on topics like pain management, preventing surgical site infections, and surgical treatment of atrial fibrillation.

“They like great graphics and fun sounds,” Engelman said. “It’s crazy, [but] that’s how we’re going teach cardiac surgery to patients.”

‘Connect With Their Circle’

Mária Žembery, MD (CINRE, Bratislava, Slovakia), who recently led a project at her institution filming a similar series of videos, told TCTMD that patient education doesn’t always need to be expensive to be effective.

Older patients have “friends or younger nieces, grandchildren, generally speaking, so you just need to try to connect with their circle. [This] is also in agreement with the ERAS idea that you should always engage the family, the close people that live by the person affected by the disease,” she said.

With that in mind, she broached the idea to her administration to hire a local videographer to film content that would answer all the common questions her cardiac surgery patients ask.

I felt crazy as a senior cardiac surgeon making TikTok videos. Daniel Engelman

“The video starts with the person coming in the hospital, so they see where the reception is and it just follows them throughout the whole hospitalization,” Žembery explained. “What IVs are we giving them? Why do they need different types of IVs? Why do they need [a] catheter? How [does] the drainage look? What is the length of the scar? What is the process of them going to sleep and waking up in the morning?”

Her team is still in the editing stage and making plans for how to deliver the footage to patients in the most digestible way possible. Engelman’s presentation suggested that TikTok might be a potential distribution outlet, she said.

“We were thinking about putting it up on our website, so that everybody can access and download,” Žembery said during the session. “Now we’re thinking of being more personalized to send them through emails, but your approach to TikTok might be revolution[ary] for us.”

Engleman hopes others will take his videos and share them with their own patients, even potentially branding them with their hospital logos. It’s still a work in progress, he added, as they will track metrics and see which videos and means of distribution are the most successful.