Anti-reflux surgery is one of the few operations where the recovery a patient worries about most happens at a table. The incisions are small and the hospital stay is often short. Then the patient gets home, and at about seven in the evening someone in the household asks the reasonable question of what to make for dinner — and the discharge instructions, folded into a bag with a prescription and a follow-up card, say something about liquids and soft foods without saying whether tonight counts.
So the text goes out to the surgeon's office, worded almost exactly the way it sounds in the kitchen: “What can I eat and what is recovery like after anti-reflux surgery?” The office closed two hours ago. The physician-approved answer PrepQ delivers, instantly, by text, reads:
“After anti-reflux surgery, most people start with liquids and soft foods and slowly work up to regular foods over the following weeks while swelling settles. Recovery often takes a couple of weeks before normal activity, with some bloating or swallowing changes early on. Diet plans differ, so it's best to follow the specific steps your care team gives you.”
What that answer does well is name the thing the patient is actually frightened of before they have to ask it. Early bloating and a tight, slow swallow after a fundoplication are expected while the wrap and the surrounding tissue are still swollen — but a patient who has not been told that will interpret the first difficult swallow as a failed operation. The answer also refuses to invent a specific diet schedule, because the progression from clear liquids to full liquids to soft foods varies by surgeon and by repair, and a guessed timeline is worse than no timeline.
How the answer gets to the patient
Every answer in the library is written by physicians, then reviewed and approved by the subscribing practice's own doctors before a single patient sees it. A surgeon who runs a two-week full-liquid protocol can say so in the practice's own words; a surgeon who advances to soft foods on day three edits the answer to match. Nothing goes live under a practice's name that the practice's clinicians have not signed off on.
Delivery is by text message and by voice call, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in English and Spanish. The patient standing in the kitchen does not have to decide whether their question is big enough to justify paging the on-call service. They text a number and get a calm, accurate answer in seconds.
Urgent symptoms are not answered by AI at all. A message describing chest pain, fever, an inability to keep any liquid down, vomiting blood, or a hard swollen abdomen is escalated out of the education path and routed to the practice's office line or, in a true emergency, to 911. That routing is deliberate: the system is built to answer the diet question, not to evaluate a leak. PrepQ is built HIPAA-eligible, and a Business Associate Agreement is available to subscribing practices.
Why this matters in general surgery
A general surgery practice runs a wider catalogue of operations than almost any other specialty on the schedule — gallbladder removal, appendectomy, bowel resection, thyroidectomy, breast surgery, and the whole family of hernia repairs — and each one sends patients home with its own set of instructions about food, wound care, and lifting. The volume of after-hours questions is not a sign that the discharge teaching failed. It is what happens when a person reads a printed instruction at the moment it finally applies to them.
Answering those questions the night they are asked has a practical effect on the office. Staff spend less of the next morning re-reading discharge sheets over the phone. Patients who understand that early bloating is expected are less likely to arrive in the emergency department for reassurance, and patients who understand the fasting instruction are less likely to eat breakfast before a case and lose the slot. The same library covers what comes next: incision care after a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, wound packing after an abscess drainage, activity limits after an umbilical or ventral repair, and what to expect in the weeks after a colectomy.
It is the same explanation the practice already gives — delivered at the hour the patient is actually asking for it. PrepQ's general surgery library was built by physicians and is governed by two founding clinicians, Keith Schmidt MD and Ryan Kuta DO, with each subscribing practice's own doctors holding final approval over what their patients receive.