Iván Hernández Dalas: How robotics is transforming healthcare, inside and outside the operating room
OTSAW recently secured a maintenance agreement with a private hospital in Singapore for its automated guided vehicle. | Source: OTSAW
Hospitals are under increasing pressure to do more with fewer resources. Both inside the operating room and in the halls of hospitals, robotics could reduce this pressure and help hospitals make the most of their staffs.
By 2030, McKinsey Health Institute predicted that a global healthcare worker shortage of at least 10 million workers. Healthcare providers are struggling to find people to do repetitive, laborious tasks that keep hospitals running, Ting Ming Ling, the founder and CEO of OTSAW, told The Robot Report.
This workforce shortage exists at every level of healthcare. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the U.S. will be short between 13,500 and 86,000 physicians by 2036.
At the same time, cuts from the White House and Congress are leaving hospitals, particularly those in rural areas, with tighter budgets. A report from the National Rural Health Association and Manatt Health found that rural hospitals will lose 21 cents out of every dollar they receive from Medicaid due to recent federal cutbacks.
Ling, who has led OTSAW to deploy logistics robots in hospitals, and Dr. Sudhir Srivastava, founder, chairman, and CEO at SS Innovations International Inc., shared their insights on how robotics can help hospitals tackle these challenges.
Telesurgery and lower costs present new opportunities
In recent years, surgical robotics adoption has increased, more surgical providers have entered the field, and costs have started to come down, according to Srivastava.
“Initially, Intuitive Surgical was dominating — currently, it has over 10,000 systems,” he said. “Now there are other companies in the pipeline, including SS Innovations, Medtronic, Cambridge Medical Robotics, Moon Surgical, Digital Motion, and others that are in various stages of either development or the approval processes.”
With a more competitive field, Srivastava said he expects costs to come down, making surgical robotic systems easier to deploy. “As new technologies are introduced, the features are becoming increasingly advanced, particularly with the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said.
In addition, advances in telesurgery, present many new opportunities, said Srivastava.
“At SS Innovations, we have found that surgeons who are new to the robotic system can be guided by the expert surgeons, sitting wherever, using their high-speed connectivity and the technology that we have developed,” he said. “There is also an option in tele-surgery where the expert surgeon can take over and finish the procedure if there is any challenge.”
“This is drastically changing the scene in terms of access for patients to whom surgical expertise would otherwise not be available,” Srivastava noted. “It also builds confidence in the operating teams because they can learn remotely as the surgeries are taking place and try again under supervision through tele-proctoring.”
COVID brought robots into hospitals, and they’re here to stay
While surgical robots have pushed new bounds in recent years, the operating room isn’t the only place embracing new technology. According to Ling, COVID was a major turning point for implementing logistics robots in hospitals. Many people left the healthcare industry, and at the same time, it was risky for the staffers who remained to constantly be exposed to airborne diseases.
“The fatigue definitely is a big factor. We saw lots of attrition, people leaving the healthcare sector due to the high risk and fatigue,” Ling said. “There were so many things going on, and now you suddenly see that there’s a vacuum or a lack of supply of this workforce.”
Now that COVID-19 has passed, interest in automation hasn’t slowed, he added. Unlike other robotics sectors, which saw a bump in sales around the pandemic but have since seen those sales slow, healthcare is just getting started, asserted Ling. And workforce shortages are only making logistics robots more important.
“From a U.S. perspective, it’s really exciting, because people are just opening up. A lot of budget or money was going to the infrastructure of hospitals during those years of COVID,” Ling said. “Right after COVID, they were still busy trying to get [hospitals] all ready in case another pandemic came. Now that all this has been settled, you look at the logistics sites and the infrastructure of the logistics.”
Logistics robots require thoughtful workflow changes
Ling said the key to deploying logistics robotics into hospitals is not to look at automation as just replacement for human workers.
“A modern U.S. hospital is a very complicated operation,” he said. “I would say it’s one of the most complicated operations in the world from a business perspective, because in the hospital you have so many various departments, and they need to intertwine and interlock and work with one another.”
This means that if one department drops the ball, this could delay care for a patient. Ling found that each department in a hospital often worked on its own, resulting in overlapping staffing in each department.
When OTSAW deploys robots, it works across departments to turn transportation into a horizontal function. This allows the hospital to take multiple people in charge of transportation in each department and upskill them to a different task.
“Then you can repurpose and upskill the human to do something else nearer to the bedside, where they can add more value and show more care and concern to the patient,” Ling said. “I think we have to rethink how we use that manpower wisely; that’s something I feel very strongly about. We need to educate. We need to look at it from a more constructive angle.”
Costs are coming down across healthcare robotics
Both Ling and Srivastava highlighted the importance of bringing costs down to make robotics more accessible. Ling said OTSAW has been focusing on producing robots at scale, which can help bring costs down. The Singapore-based company also offers a leasing model for its robots to further reduce barriers to adoption.
“You don’t need to buy it. You just lease it from us. And from the first day you save money,” said Ling. “We will invest. We put in the infrastructure, we put in the robot, we will train your people, and we will put in the technicians there to maintain the fleet of robots.”
Ling asserted that hospitals can save money quickly when implementing logistics robots. OTSAW customers see a return on investment (ROI) in just 30 days, and they can save $2.6 million a year in operating costs, he said.
Bringing down the costs of surgical robots is much trickier, and something that Gurugram, India-based SS Innovations has worked hard to do.
“SS Innovations has created a very advanced and different type of robotic system, which ultimately is very cost-effective compared to others,” Srivastava said. “Since the cost factor has been addressed, it will lead to much greater penetration, ultimately translating into access by the patients.”
However, as SS Innovations grows, the company has faced its own workforce challenges.
“With so many companies entering the space, recruiting experienced robotics engineers has become increasingly difficult. I believe this will remain a challenge as competition grows,” Srivastava said. “However, with education and robotic institutes where engineers can be trained from the beginning, the industry can face these challenges head-on. This would make finding talent much easier, and robotic technologies could continue to evolve.”
Humans remain at the center of healthcare
While there are many opportunities for robotics to improve healthcare, humans will still be at the center of it all. When it comes to surgical robotics, Srivastava said surgeons will always be involved to some degree for the foreseeable future.
“Even when semi-automation and automation come into practice, the surgeon must remain actively involved,” Srivastava said. “We cannot leave everything to the machine without compromising the safety of the patient due to the complexity of variable anatomy and different findings that may be unanticipated.”
“I think, in the next five to 10 years, as the machines become more available, it will upscale surgeons’ skill levels and enhance their surgical careers,” he added. “Moreover, using robotic surgery with features like magnified 3D vision, filtered cameras, precise translation of patient emotions, and a lot of the procedures that otherwise are very challenging will become accessible to patients.”
On the logistics side, Ling said he believes robots will ultimately free up hospital workers to spend more face time with patients, and less time doing repetitive manual tasks.
“There is so much that we can do to empower and uplift and upskill our people. I think more should be said about that,” Ling said. “If we just talk about the technology and the world without the human, then the equation isn’t correct, and that puts fear into humans today. We need to be sensitive, we need to be inclusive, we need to put that human in the equation.”
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