By
Robert Davis, USA TODAY As Joseph Mabry waited for the machine
nicknamed "robo doc" to roll into his hospital room, the recovering
kidney surgery patient was in no mood for a faceless drone.
Johns Hopkins urologist Dr. Lou Kavoussi (on screen) accompanies
colleague Sam Bhayani on rounds. By Tim Dillon, USA TODAY
"I had just had surgery, so I was feeling kind of down," he
says.
But when Mabry, a bus operator from Baltimore, saw his doctor's
face on the flat-screen TV atop the robot's body, he perked
up. "I didn't expect to look up and see my doctor's face,"
says Mabry, 47. "It felt pretty good."
Over the next few days, he saw the robot often and left Baltimore's
Johns Hopkins University Hospital a fan of the technology.
Robo doc may be the face of tomorrow's medicine. It's being
tested in five hospitals across the nation by InTouch Health,
a California-based heath-care technology firm, to see whether
the doc-in-a-box can give quality care.
"With the aging population, there is a real shortage of medical
professionals," says InTouch Health chief executive Yulun
Wang. "This is an extender. It can be a doctor extender or
a nurse extender."
The study seeks to determine whether physicians can adequately
assess their patients from afar using secure wireless Internet
connections and robots equipped with cameras and TV screens.
At Johns Hopkins, the robot is the surrogate for Louis Kavoussi,
the renal surgeon who operated on Mabry and is lead investigator
in the robot trial.
For some procedures, machines are just better, Kavoussi says.
"The laying of the hands is very valuable from a psychological
standpoint. But X-rays are better than our hands. A CT scan
or ultrasound is going to show 1,000 times more than a physician's
hands."
So far, most patients are telling researchers that they prefer
their own doctor talking to them through the robot than a
stranger who happens to be in the hospital when a consultation
is needed after surgery.
Robots are not new to hospitals. Across the country, robots
are:
• Operating. The da Vinci Surgical System, a robot
operated by a surgeon seated at a viewing and control console,
can see better and move surgical tools more carefully around
delicate organs than its human counterpart. Patients have
been shown to recover faster when operated on by the robot.
• Filling prescriptions. Using bar codes and computerized
safety checks, ROBOT-Rx fills prescriptions in hospital pharmacies
without the risk of human error. Medication errors are a leading
cause of preventable hospital deaths.
• Delivering goods. The TUG robot calls elevators and
glides through hospital hallways carrying loads of linens,
medications, food or anything else that needs to be carted
around a hospital. Faced with nursing and other staff shortages,
TUG frees up busy humans.
But the "robo doc" takes the trend to a new level because
it is face to face with the patient at a most vulnerable time:
after surgery.
Complications can arise immediately after surgery, posing
life-and-death challenges for doctors and the hospital staff.
Is another drug needed? Is an infection brewing? Does the
patient need to go back to the operating room?
Technology is particularly important in the surgical wards,
says Maureen Bisognano, who heads the Institute for Healthcare
Improvement, a Boston-based non-profit organization.
She likes the robot because it cuts the medical middle man,
where mistakes can be made. "Trying to pass in- formation
from one physician to another, things get lost," she says.
"Eliminating that is very appealing.
"These patients are sicker than they have been in years,"
she says, and that creates a heavy load for the medical staff.
"There is a lot of turnover of nursing staff in the medical
surgical units."
Her staff is looking for ways to improve care at the bedside.
One key is "a marriage of technology that frees up more time
for care."
The robo-doc study will try to determine whether patients
recover as well, if they undergo more scans or procedures
and if they are comfortable with robo-treatment. Early findings
show that most patients think the robot increases their access
to their own doctor.
Mabry, for instance, was in the hospital over the weekend,
and Kavoussi often visited him by navigating the robot into
the hospital room using a joystick — from the basement of
his home.
"I can look decent from the waist up on the computer screen,"
Kavoussi says. "We end up spending twice as much time talking
to the patient when we're with the robot."
Kavoussi has financial ties to the company that makes the
robot. His relationship with the company is monitored by Johns
Hopkins officials.
He says future models might have more sensors that doctors
can use to measure the oxygen level in the blood, to listen
to breath sounds or to peer beneath the skin with ultrasound.
"I hope it catches on," Mabry says. "When you are in the hospital
and you need something, you talk to a nurse or some doctor
on call. I got to talk to my own doctor."
By
Robert Davis, USA TODAY As Joseph Mabry waited for the machine
nicknamed "robo doc" to roll into his hospital room, the recovering
kidney surgery patient was in no mood for a faceless drone.
