Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Special Outpatient Surgery Edition - Megatrends - January 2018

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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flexible robots will be able to operate from within the body, which will create seemingly endless possi- bilities about the technology's future applications. Preemptive care Surgeons will be able to treat diseases before they cause patients harm. An example: General surgery is moving toward assessing genetic profiles to target indi- viduals who are at increased risk of developing gastric cancer. Those patients could undergo an endoscopic pro- cedure during which surgeons identify patches of stomach tissue that are on the cusp of becoming cancerous. Surgeons would then be able to remove the pre-cancerous tissue and suture the area closed from inside the stomach. The entire extirpative procedure would be done endoscopically. That type of preemptive surgery will become commonplace. Reallocation of resources The movement of complex procedures from inpatient to outpatient facilities will continue as surgical technologies evolve, surgeons perform surgery less invasively through smaller incisions and natural orifices, and post-op pain control practices improve. Much of the outpatient migration will be driven by the worthy goal of decreasing healthcare expenses through the elim- ination of costly post-op hospital stays. That will be only part of the story. We're limiting our focus on current inpatient procedures that could shift to outpatient facilities without considering the development of new invasive 2 3 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 5 • DOCTOR DROID Robots won't replace surgeons, but they might dramatically alter how they perform pro- cedures and provide access to previously unreachable anatomy.

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