Rapid recovery in total hip arthroplasty

Significant advances have been made in the perioperative care of patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty, enabling rapid recovery with mobilization hours after the surgical intervention. Rapid recovery programs following total hip arthroplasty have become the gold standard of care worldwide. These programs provide a standardized multidisciplinary multimodal approach to the care of the patient. Proper preoperative patient selection, education, and rehabilitation will ensure that the expectations of the patient, family, and surgeon are aligned. Preoperative optimization of the patient’s comorbidities allows for the patient to be treated under a healthy-patient model rather than a traditional sick-patient model. Preoperative evaluation combined with multimodal anesthesia techniques, efficient surgery, and aggressive postoperative pain management and rehabilitation will allow rapid recovery of the patient who undergoes total hip arthroplasty. Successful implementation of rapid recovery programs has been shown to result in decreased hospital lengths of stay, significant cost savings, and improved functional patient outcomes without increasing the hospital readmission rate or complication rate.