I met Jim at one of our first West Coast OR Manager Conferences in San Francisco in the early 90s. He was a speaker that year, and we were seated at the same table at the Speaker’s Dinner. Jim was still in the Navy and was wearing his white uniform.…

Read More

COVID-19 was a catalyst that helped accelerate innovation in healthcare by a decade, says Jay Banerjee, chief operating officer and cofounder of ImmersiveTouch, a virtual reality (VR) surgery company in Chicago. “Many things that would have taken 20 to 30 years happened sooner,” Banerjee says. “Telemedicine; electronic health records; remote…

Read More

After writing my latest article on surgical robots (Operationalizing a robotics program for evenings, weekends, pp 13–15, 19) for this issue of OR Manager, I reminisced on how the surgical robot has evolved and how my interest in surgical robots began.   Reminiscing about robots It all began with the…

Read More

The Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago has a mission: to successfully serve children with complex airway disorders requiring pulmonary, upper digestive tract, sleep, voice, and swallowing evaluations. As a 360-bed facility ranked among the country’s top children’s hospitals by US News & World Report and housing more than 1,800…

Read More

The St Elizabeth Healthcare organization in northern Kentucky has eight facilities, including two surgery centers. The flagship hospital on the Edgewood campus has 534 beds and 22 ORs and typically performs some 14,000 surgical procedures per year. Robots help manage the volume. The Edgewood, Florence, and Ft Thomas hospitals have…

Read More

The world of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has evolved and continues to become more widely used, and the medical industry represents one of its most promising applications. Scientists at the University of Bern’s Center for Biomedical Engineering Research have already found a way to carry out robot-assisted cochlear implantation,…

Read More

Imagine this: As a nurse in the OR talks with a patient, a computer listens in, recording the nurse’s notes so that data are added automatically to be retrieved later. The surgeon and anesthesiologist also interact with the patient without the burden of manual data entry, and the insurance company…

Read More

Consider the following requests posed to OR scheduling staff by surgeons: • “I need two blocks in different rooms to accommodate my daily case volume.” • “Can’t I just use that empty room to start my next case while the first case is wrapping up?” Surgeon requests like these are…

Read More

On September 15, 2022, AORN released its updated Guideline for Processing Flexible Endoscopes. Over the past several years, there has been significant research on flexible endoscope processing—research that met the stringent requirements and has been included in this revised guideline by AORN’s lead author and team. Endoscope processing begins with…

Read More

David Shapiro, MD, who is a risk manager/medical director at several ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) near Tallahassee, Florida, has seen his fair share of contracts with anesthesia services. Navigating these types of contracts at a time when anesthesiology is suffering from a workforce shortage and high costs for services is…

Read More