From the April 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

In 2013, our team adopted Dr. Burchiel’s technique in Colorado. In 2014, we revised his technique by adopting the Mazor robot to reduce the deviation of the initial pass to .87 millimeters. The lead itself is 1.27 millimeters in diameter, making our deviations, on average, less than the size of the lead itself.

Making DBS more cost-effective
All surgeons and leaders of hospitals know that OR time is expensive. According to The Journal of Clinical Anesthesia, it costs roughly $62 per minute. The lengthy nature of traditional DBS surgery makes it challenging for hospitals to build out that procedure.

With our approach of using the robot and the CereTom, what used to take eight to 10 hours now takes 1 1/2 or two hours. This means we can complete three bilateral cases in one day, rather than one. If you are only able to produce one surgery per day, the finances simply don’t add up. At South Denver Neurosurgery, even considering our declining reimbursements, the hospital makes a profit on our DBS procedures. The major reasons for that include our ability to image soft tissue portably in the OR (something we couldn’t do before obtaining the CereTom), produce an excellent estimate of the lead location before the person ever wakes up, and the speed at which we are able to operate.

The greater precision we gain by using the CereTom allows us to place a lead with a single penetration nearly 85 percent of the time. This decreases the amount of intracranial hemorrhages and lowers infection rates, which can lead to fewer readmissions for additional surgeries needed to fix complications.

Fulfilling a known need
Surgeons know that there is a growing number of patients who could benefit from DBS. As centers adopt an anatomy-based approach to DBS using portable CT imaging, they will be able to perform more than 100 cases a year. Using the image-guided approach is the only way to scale to serve this number of patients and expect it to be cost-efficient. On average, those that adopt this technique will likely see a return and profit within a year or two of the initial investment.

And in a health care industry increasingly focused on patient experience, not having to lie awake for up to 10 hours, or return for an additional surgery, certainly contributes to a patient being more satisfied. It also makes it more attractive for insurance company approvals, which don’t want to have to pay for a second surgery. If a hospital is able to provide the same surgery in a fraction of the time, it will be more successful in marketing itself as a preferred site.

April 2018 Magazine

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