Rijnstate and OLV Hospital in Aalst, Belgium, are going to jointly develop a quality label for robotic surgery. They will base this on the Value Based Healthcare principles, balancing patient value and healthcare costs.
The hospitals recently signed a cooperation agreement for the project. Robotic surgery is a promising technology. An operating robot translates the movements of the surgeon's fingers with great precision and also filters out any vibrations in the hand. Contrary to what the name might suggest, an operating robot never works by itself, but is always controlled by a surgeon from a console.
In addition, the robot features narrow, flexible arms and rotatable 'wrist joints'. This allows it to reach areas that are less easily accessible in normal surgery or keyhole surgery. Because surgeons can work more precisely, surrounding tissue is spared as much as possible. In addition, patients experience less blood loss, less pain and less scar tissue. This leads to faster recovery.
Initially focused on urological interventions
Initially, Rijnstate and OLV Hospital are focusing on a quality label for robot-assisted urological procedures, mainly involving prostate surgery. The results of this are expected to be available in 2021. In a subsequent phase, Rijnstate and OLV Hospital want to broaden their focus to other medical disciplines.
Both Rijnstate and OLV Hospital are the largest national centres in the field of robotic surgery in the Netherlands and Belgium respectively. The parties want to use a quality label to raise the standard of care. Not only for their own organisations, but also for other national and international hospitals. They can join the label. The prerequisite for this is transparency in data and multidisciplinary working.
Centres of Excellence
The parties also aim to set up Centres of Excellence on robotic surgery. To this end, they want to cooperate with other centres, both nationally and internationally.
"We already have a lot of experience with the Da Vinci robotic platforms and we think robotic surgery can be organised differently. Not in separate hospitals with high volumes per tumour type, but in centres that treat multiple types of tumours," says Geert Smits, Rijnstate urologist. Smits talks about cross-pollination between nerve-sparing prostate removals, bladder- and kidney-sparing surgeries, or robotic surgery on bowels. "In our case, this cross-pollination transcends disciplines. It makes dedicated surgery teams more flexible, versatile and multi-deployable. It ensures fast, efficient and cost-effective implementation of improved and also innovative surgical techniques."
Doctor Geert De Naeyer, urologist OLV Hospital: "Open communication about outcomes is at the basis of this cooperation, with the aim of learning from each other and offering patients the best care. Both hospitals will exchange data to enable annual benchmarking and exchange of best practices. This involves both clinical data and the findings of the patients involved, which are recorded via the internationally recognised methodology Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS). Based on this shared knowledge, joint projects will be developed to achieve greater health gains for patients."
How does an operating robot work?
Curious how an operating robot works? In the video below, Rijnstate gives an introduction to the Da Vinci SI, one of the operating robots the hospital works with.
Author: Wouter Hoeffnagel
Photo: ©2020 Intuitive Surgical, Inc.
