Editor's Note Robotic surgery can improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and improve efficiencies and turnover time, but only if it’s done right. In a conference session yesterday,  Michelle Toder, MD offered insights, best practices, and lessons learned during two decades of experience in pioneering robotic applications in weight loss and…

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Editor's Note Understanding the impact of value-based care on the surgical suite (VBC) will be essential for hospitals to understand as payers begin to seek partners in new payment models. In a conference session yesterday, Lauren Cricchi, associate principal, financial services at Avalere Healthcare and Katie Sullivan, senior vice president,…

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Editor's Note For Northwell Health University System, a large hospital system in New York state, saving millions in OR expenses in just a few years’ time was possible not just through meticulous analytics, but also cultural transformation. This was among the chief conclusions of a session led by Adam Becker,…

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Editor's Note Although ChatGPT has shown human-level performance on several professional and academic benchmarks, a recent study of its potential for clinical applications raised questions among surgeon evaluators. Findings were reported in the journal Surgery on January 20. Specifically, researchers tested OpenAI’s general-purpose large-language model on questions from the Surgical…

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Editor's Note:  Preoperative thyroid hormone replacement independently predicts operative morbidity and length of stay following major abdominal surgery, according to a January 23 report in the American Journal of Surgery. To determine the association between preoperative thyroid hormone replacement and complications following major abdominal surgery, researchers performed a retrospective case…

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Editor's Note: A recent study suggests artificial intelligence (AI) can be valuable for identifying patients who consumed risky amounts of of alcohol prior to surgery. Findings appeared in the journal Alcohol, Clinical and Experimental Research on January 8. For the study, researchers extracted 3 years of text-based clinical records from…

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In every OR, the complicated dance of surgical care coordination—the series of handoffs between stakeholders throughout the surgery lifecycle—is performed mainly in the background. Those stakeholders include physician offices, schedulers, preadmission testing, insurance verification, vendors, sterile processing, supply chain, anesthesia, and surgical staff. But what does it look like when…

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Editor's Note: Complex surgeries at high-volume (“hub”) hospitals are less likely to result in death or serious morbidity (DSM) than other hospitals within a system (“spokes”), the American Journal of Surgery reported December 25. However, patients undergoing common surgical care procedures at hubs are more likely to experience prolonged length…

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Editor's Note: An FDA-approved anti-inflammatory drug used to treat poisoning and liver damage could help reduce patient requests for opioids after surgery, according to findings published October 25 in the Future Medicine journal Pain Management. The study involved 50 patients who were given either a set dose of the anti-inflammatory…

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Editor's Note: Already shown to have a heightened risk of esophageal cancer, Asian Americans are also more likely to experience complications from esophagectomy, according to a study published January 4 in the American Journal of Surgery. The retrospective analysis, performed using ACS-NSQIP esophagectomy targeted database 2016–2021, compared 30-day postoperative outcomes…

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