Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
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drawing surgeons to your facility and increasing their efficiency, these technologies may also help to improve patient safety. Overall, there's a pretty basic principle driving these advances — if I can see better, I can do a better job. HD is essential for improved images By far, the most revolutionizing technology for laparoscopy in ORs today is high-definition video. Most facilities are now equipped with HD imaging systems, and several are on their "second wave" of equip- ment as things have become outdated. Besides offering a higher reso- lution, I believe that HD video has been a huge step forward for patient safety. While it's not clinically proven, it seems like common sense that it's easier for a surgeon performing a laparoscopic chole- cystectomy to confuse the bile duct for the cystic duct when looking at standard images over HD ones. Ask any physician and you'll hear a similar story — HD's clearer, crisper images make it easier to cut, seal, suction, suture and do just about everything else laparoscopical- ly. HD systems have become standard in many ORs, but that doesn't mean they aren't constantly improving. Laparoscopes' designs have been updated to make them smaller and compatible with 5 mm ports, and many new scopes feature ergonomic enhancements like single- hand control. Personally, I like all-in-one designs where the light cable and camera system are contained in one unit, since they're easier to use and require less maintenance. Just like your iPhone camera, their optics are also improving, with newer models offering better lighting and resolution than their predecessors. Scopes are also becoming more specialized. One example is laparo- scopes that are being made to fit our increasing bariatric patient pop- ulation. When I first started in the field, performing a laparoscopic procedure on a bariatric patient meant using instruments that felt too 1 1 7 M A R C H 2 0 1 5 | O U T P A T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T