By Gary Guthart
When the aim is to improve surgical outcomes for patients around the world, having the latest technology that helps physicians tap their potential is a great start.
Intuitive pioneered robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) over the past quarter century on six continents. We’ve faced competition each of those years, whether it be from open techniques, traditional laparoscopy, and other minimally invasive approaches.
The recent influx of additional entrants, bringing new robots to the market or increase in RAS-related investments, all support the potential of minimally invasive technology that we’ve championed from the beginning.
As robotic-assisted techniques increasingly become more prevalent in many different procedures, one thing has become clearer to me as I talk with hospital leaders, surgeons and regulators: creating better outcomes in this business requires much more than a functional robot.
At Intuitive, the needs of our customers have always been our driver. We’ve learned through deeply understanding our customers—patients, surgeons, hospital administrators, care teams—and embracing their quadruple aim : better outcomes, better experience for the patient, better experience for the surgeon and care team, and doing it all at increasingly lower costs going forward.
Those are tall orders—to deliver on them requires much more than a robotic platform. It requires a multi-faceted and ongoing technology training program—an always-on-call service and maintenance system that helps the systems stay fully operational—and a collection of digital tools to support analytics that help track cost, use, and outcomes, and have the potential to do even more.
Building this ecosystem that supports a robotic platform takes as many resources and as much time and experience as the innovative technology itself. Customers want to understand how the entire package feels and how it helps their team members meet goals.
Robust training is the backbone of our ecosystem, enabling surgeons to learn how to use the technology at their own pace using advanced simulation tools enabled by telepresence technology. We offer a training passport program so they can mark their progress, and back it up with peer-to-peer mentor support, online resources, and case proctoring at every step of their training journey.
Intuitive’s ecosystem supports da Vinci surgical system reliability by monitoring system performance and helping anticipate maintenance events. A suite of software applications helps determine what surgeons and care teams need to know and when that information should be delivered. The goal remains to improve their understanding of a procedure, whether it be through advanced imaging, or using fluorescence applications to assist in identifying tissue.
The physical aspects of a robotic surgical device take years of continuous innovation to refine, but it’s the potential of the data from robotic systems– and finding useful insights for customers from that data – where we excel.
That’s where the 10 million surgical procedures already completed using our technology gives Intuitive the opportunity to help turn data into actionable insights. Our custom hospital analytics group and our Genesis teams engage with customers to dive deeply into their practice groups to search for improvements, and it’s an exciting space because of what we’re finding in terms of optimization and interesting advances in surgical training.
With My Intuitive App, we’re putting the power of that data into our customers’ hands to let them see where their procedure and instrument times land compared with national averages. Some surgeons are taking this new understanding and trying to improve metrics around how they practice.
Getting a robotic system to the point where its data can help drive continuous improvement isn’t easy, but it’s what compels us to innovate. We know other companies are bringing different ideas into this space, and I always tell our customers: go try them! Let us continue to earn your business with our quality. Because as we look at the different ideas coming toward the marketplace, we’ve tried them in our own research over the past two decades, and we feel confident in the choices we’ve made.
We’ve evolved our products by listening closely to customers, and we invest in research to help solve the true problems our customers bring to our attention. With each innovation, we try to answer the Why? That feedback fuels our innovation and helps build trust, as well as the growing set of clinical research (now approaching 30,000 studies and counting) that supports the use of Intuitive’s robotic-assisted technologies.
It’s a major accomplishment to bring a robotic system to the market, with the required clinical research, regulatory approvals, and requisite engineering. I think what we’ve found is that there is so much more to do to make a robotic practice work well for our customers, and it’s a challenge that we embrace every day.