website – enhatch
The Evolution of Intelligent Surgery™ (enhatch website)
The introduction of artificial intelligence is effecting a change in musculoskeletal medicine – an evolution from traditional orthopedic surgery into Intelligent Surgery™.
Intelligent Surgery™ is the use of artificial intelligence to enhance implant design, expedite surgical technique, optimize inventory logistics, and simplify clinical workflows, by connecting and learning from patient data during each step of the surgical care continuum.
Intelligent Surgery™ is a vision evolved out of a system struggling to meet the demand for orthopedic care. The projected demands for joint reconstruction continue to increase with the aging population. Increased life expectancy also creates a bubble of older people who are trying to remain just as active longer, specifically weighing on the orthopedics sector of healthcare for long-lasting joint reconstruction. With the Baby Boomers funneling into retirement, patients are already seeing a bottleneck effect in access to treatment, with waitlists for surgery spanning six months to a year.
The generation bubble is encapsulating and suffocating the workforce of orthopedic surgeons. Global trends toward unhealthy lifestyles have lead to high rates of obesity translating into high rates of arthritis. Surgeons who used to perform a few hundred cases per year now scheduling upwards of 1000 procedures every year. This gap between supply and demand continues to widen itself due to surgeon burnout — surgeon burnout is outpacing the training and maturing of new experts in the field.
Orthopedics must evolve into Intelligent Surgery™ to help meet the demand. Extensive integration of technology is the only way to reduce the time and cost of every procedure. And there are endless opportunities for the use of artificial intelligence before, during, and after surgery to help overcome challenges to efficient and effective patient care.
In this blog series, we will cover different areas of Intelligent Surgery™ and the companies that are providing solutions today.
1. Preoperative Planning
2. Patient Specific Implants and Instruments
3. Inventory Logistics
4. Surgical Training and Virtual Reality
5. Surgical Navigation Systems
6. Robotic Surgery
7. Patient Apps and Wearables
8. Artificial Intelligence and Population Health Data
