Robotic Joint Replacement Launched At Ambulatory Surgery Center
BAY SHORE, NY — South Shore University Hospital has recently launched the first ambulatory robotic joint replacement program on Long Island, in a freestanding facility.
Dr. Keith Reinhardt, chief of joint reconstruction, told Patch that the program launched in December 2021 at South Shore's Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC). While the hospital has performed surgeries with robotics for years, the program is the first of its kind, as a freestanding facility, to perform robotic total knees, robotic anterior total hips and robotic partial knee replacements.
Reinhardt said that this new technology in procedures allows a multitude of advantages for patients.
“Robotically, we can be very precise of how much of the correction we achieve.”
Compared to manual surgery, robotics is a method of surgery that allows a surgeon to control small tools attached to a robotic arm.
For example, when performing surgery on a knee deformity, he said, a surgeon may have difficulty aligning a limb with perfect correction. With robotics, surgeons have more knowledge about different variables in a surgery, and can adjust ligaments to different degrees.
“In the past, as a surgeon, we would do the knee replacement and feel the knee and then say, okay, that feels good,” Reinhardt said. “Now I can say, well, the lateral collateral ligament has one millimeter less tension than the medial collateral ligament, and I can adjust my implant to degrees. And now my ligament tensions are exactly even.”
According to a 2021 study, up 20 percent of patients nationwide are unsatisfied with their knee arthroplasty.
When a surgery incorporates robotics, Reinhardt said, it’s easier for doctors to tailor the procedure to a body’s natural movement. With this technology, he expects even more patients to be satisfied post-surgery.
“We think that creating an alignment of their limb that's more customized to them, and not just a cookie cutter alignment, that may address that certain percentage of patients who are 100 percent satisfied,” he said.
Robotic surgery can be used for the most complex surgeries, in addition to knee surgeries, Reinhardt told Patch. Hip surgeries, he said, are what initially drove him to using the technology.
With robotics, surgeons can predict how much motion a person can have with their hip before a procedure. They can also take a patient’s hip through a virtual range of motion during surgery.
“For me, it was always a little bit of a guessing game, exactly, where the acetabular component, (the cup of the hip replacement) was being placed,” Reinhardt said. “Now we know exactly where it is relative to the pelvis. We know exactly how the pelvis moves when a patient sits and stands.”
The robotic surgery program, which took six months of planning, took a whole team of nurses, anesthesiologists, and surgeons to bring to life.
“The team that we built to accomplish consisted of many people,” he said. “The contributions from everybody were critical.”
Reinhardt also said that since the surgery center is separate from the hospital, many patients chose the program to avoid COVID-19 exposure.
“What we have found, particularly with COVID, is a lot of patients desire to have surgery somewhere other than a hospital,” Reinhardt said. “They want to minimize how much time they spend in a hospital.”
Reinhardt, who was raised in Long Island, told Patch that bringing this new technology to his home is more than rewarding.
“There's nobody that's doing anything more advanced than what we're doing there. I'm very proud of it,” Reinhardt said. “To be able to have a highly advanced robotic joint program, in an ambulatory surgery center on the South Shore where I grew up, there's nothing better than that.”
This article originally appeared on the Bay Shore Patch
