Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
Issue link: http://outpatientsurgery.uberflip.com/i/1164519
Message from the President Positioned for success I invite you to read the accompanying article on the Getinge PILOT system, which includes an X-ray and MR compatible surgical platform with a patient transfer system designed for the Maquet Magnus operating table system. As you'll discover, the PILOT system is designed to facilitate patient transport throughout the hospital while eliminating the need to reposition the patient during intraoperative whole-body imaging at any point during the procedure. Needless to say, the ability to establish and maintain optimal positioning throughout all stages of patient transport offers significant clinical benefits and workflow advantages. While considering these key benefits, I began to consider how many of our company's other surgical and technology platforms are designed to facilitate effective patient positioning and improve outcomes. For instance, our Maquet Yuno II mobile operating table is purposefully designed to simplify hip joint replacement. In this regard, Yuno II provides a smooth combination of leg rotation, abduction, adduction, and height adjustments to enhance access to the surgical site while maximizing the physical comfort of the surgical team. Precise patient positioning is also crucial to ensure the success of tibia nailing. Yuno II, with tibia adapter and joint supporting arm accessories, provides the required angles for superior tibia access. Maquet Meera, a multi-disciplinary mobile operating table, provides another example of a product that facilitates enhanced patient positioning within a surgical environment. The table can be configured in 45 different ways to accommodate hundreds of procedures. It may very well be the OR table your surgeons would build if surgeons built tables. Meera facilitates a wide range of surgical procedures on a single accessory-enriched mobile platform with uncompromised patient comfort, access and safety. The physical proximity of the surgeon to the patient and surgical site is one of those important human factors that give surgeons and their colleagues every opportunity to perform at their very best, regardless of the length or complexity of the procedure. That is why our surgical tables are specifically designed to help eliminate the clinical risks associated with excessive surgeon fatigue. Even our surgical lighting systems account for patient positioning requirements and surgeon comfort. For example, Maquet PowerLED II surgical lights feature exclusive Automatic Illumination Management (AIM) technology that actively compensates for light blocked by the surgeon's head by boosting the remaining zones. As a result of this feature, surgeons enjoy total freedom of movement without any reduction in Illumination to maintain an effective view of the surgical cavity regardless of the patient's position. What's more, our Maquet Moduevo ceiling supply units easily adapt to complex new procedures and therapies in the traditional and hybrid OR to facilitate provider-patient interactions – especially wherever space is at a premium. In all of these examples, the underlying principle is based on the fundamental requirement to adapt the surgical environment to the needs of the patients and those who provide surgical care – not the other way around. Getinge understands that if we can't place the patient in the proper position, we put the surgeon in a terrible position. At Getinge, we take every possible measure to ensure this does not happen. Eric Honroth President, Getinge North America Staying alive in rural America In our previous issue, Managing Risk chronicled the plight of rural hospitals in the United States. Since 2010, nearly 100 of the nation's more than 2,000 rural hospitals have closed their doors. Furthermore, it is estimated that as many as 700 more institutions are at risk of closing over the next ten years. The reasons for this crisis are four-fold: the high rate of uninsured patients and uncompensated care has dramatically reduced hospital revenues; the long-term decline in inpatient admissions has created unused capacity and overstaffing; the financial inability of cash-strapped rural hospitals to match the innovation capabilities of their urban and suburban counterparts; and the lack of success in aracting a sufficient number of key specialists who oen are beer compensated at major metropolitan institutions. Disadvantaged in many respects, rural hospitals are fighting an uphill bale in the face of changing demographics and the redistribution of population centers throughout the country. As a result of these factors, rural institutions are now forced to consider a number of measures to keep their doors open. A growing number of at-risk rural hospitals are looking to form broad-based health system partnerships to access emerging technologies to help bridge the gaps in professional expertise and technological innovation. For example, according to Business Intelligence, several small rural and community hospitals lacking the staff to care for serious conditions in neonates collaborated with Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare on a telehealth program. The collaboration used video conferencing to access the clinical expertise of neonatal specialists at Intermountain Healthcare. The program reduced newborn air medical transfers by 29% helping the rural hospitals save upwards of $18,000 per flight. Other rural hospitals look to survive by seeking to be purchased by larger health systems, but oen make poor acquisition targets because they require a significant capital investment and offer lile assurance of future profitability. As a result, some rural providers have teamed up to boost their financial performance while maintaining their independence. One such partnership is TPC, a group of nine independent health systems including 20 hospitals in Texas, Arkansas and Missouri. TPC functions Second of a two-part series