What is Data-Driven Surgery and How is It Different from Digital Surgery?
Data-driven surgery is on the rise, offering better outcomes to patients and helping surgeons offer the best care possible. The adoption of artificial intelligence presents challenges and advancements that the surgical industry must continue to overcome and adopt.
What is Data-Driven Surgery?
Data-driven surgery utilizes the immense amount of surgical information being collected to improve:
Surgical outcomes
Risk of complications
Patient care
Variations in surgical procedures exist with every individual. Case- and patient-specific variations can be better understood when data is connected with:
Analytics that can help identify potential outcome issues and deviations
Automation to rapidly interpret the data and make it easier to use
AI can also be connected to the data for further analysis and interpretation
Surgical records are being created that combine a wealth of patient information together to make it easier for surgeons to use it for greater outcomes. These systems can include pre- and post-operative data.
Additional, data-driven surgery can include monitoring patient conditions to reduce surgical variability, allowing for:
Shorter post-operative stays
Less risk of complications
Higher profitability for the surgical facility
Better overall pricing control for patients
Data creation in the healthcare industry accounts for 30% of all new data being created. An immense amount of data is only useful when it’s possible to automate analysis, look for patient similarities and better predict surgical variations, risks and outcomes.
How Does Data-Driven Surgery Differ from Digital Surgery?
Digital surgery is different from data-driven surgery because the latter doesn’t require robotics. Instead of using data to improve proficiency and outcomes, digital surgery relies on:
Robots or technology to assist with the procedure
Advanced imaging
High-tech instruments
Connected devices
Robotics is a major component of digital surgery, although it’s not for data-driven solutions. Sure, the data-driven approach can be used alongside digital surgery, but the two are distinct from one another.
The data-driven approach relies less on vendor technology that continues to advance, change and require new training to be leveraged to its fullest extent.
Benefits of Data-Driven Surgeries
A data-driven surgery has many benefits that include:
Patient outcomes improve, allowing for lower-risk surgical procedures, happier patients and less risk of complications.
Efficiency in the surgical room. An efficient surgical room saves hospitals and surgical centers money. A slight improvement in efficiency can allow for more surgeries to be performed and higher profit margins.
Streamline of surgical procedures to an extent that is more routine and includes fewer unknown variables. Surgery will always require patient-specific approaches and variables, yet data-driven approaches do allow for some level of streamlining.
Variations in the surgical room can increase surgeon and nurse stress, lower patient outcome and increase costs for patients and hospitals. With the high data creation rate, it makes sense for surgeons to rely on data-driven approaches when prepping for a procedure.
Conclusion
Surgeons will continue to rely on data-driven surgery to help improve patient outcomes. Training of the future will require cadavers along with how to use the advanced systems and data available to use to improve the patient’s outcome and better identify risks and necessary procedure variations.
