Ronney Abaza, MD, on maximizing the benefits of minimally invasive robotic surgery

In this video, Ronney Abaza, MD, FACS, discusses his work on maximizing the benefits of minimally invasive robotic surgery by providing them in an outpatient setting. Abaza is a robotic urologic surgeon at Central Ohio Urology Group in Columbus, Ohio.

Video Transcript:

One of the big research interests that I have surrounds clinical pathways after robotic surgery. So, the idea that we're doing these robotic surgeries, rather than the old-fashioned open surgery, for 2 reasons. One, because they're minimally invasive, and it's better for the patient—easier to recover from. But then number 2, that the instruments are better, the vision is better, [and] we think we can do a better job than we could do through open surgery. That's debatable. The open surgeons would say no, but I think the robotic surgeons are pretty convinced that we can do a better job with robotic surgery than we would be able to do open.

But the first topic that I was saying that the minimally invasive nature of the surgery, if we're doing these surgeries minimally invasively so that the patients can benefit and recover faster, then we should be able to see that benefit on the backside. If we can combine the idea of enhanced surgical pathways for patients after surgery with the fact that it's minimally invasive operation, then we can really take most advantage from the fact that we haven't done a big open surgery in the pain and the narcotics and all that stuff. So that's one of my big interests is how can we most capitalize on the minimally invasive nature of robotic surgery and see that benefit in how well the patients do post-operatively?

A lot of my work is around trying to drive outpatient surgery pathways for outpatient robotic surgery so that patients can have their prostatectomy, nephrectomy, partial nephrectomy, all of these different robotic procedures, and go home the same day. Not have to stay in a hospital, not be in a strange environment with the IV beeping all night and the nurse coming and checking the urine output all night, and waking them up, and having to eat hospital food, and all these different things. Patients would much prefer to be at home if they can be at home. The idea is, well, if we're doing this surgery minimally invasively, and they really shouldn't have much pain, then why do we need to keep them in the hospital? Let's see if we can get them home like they do with gallbladder, hernia, these other operations. So, I've gotten to the point now where more than 99% of my patients go home the same day, whether it's kidney surgery, prostate surgery, whatever the operation that I'm doing, the patients are able to go home the same day. It's something like 99.3%. It's very rare that a patient has to stay in the hospital overnight after a robotic surgery as long as they're getting a good quality operation. If we do all the patient education, prepare them for it, then patients are really happy to go home and not have to stay in a hospital.

Then the other enabling part of this is that it allows us to now be able to offer robotic surgery in a surgery center where I have patients who are coming to see me for prostate cancer, for example, or a kidney tumor, for example, and I can say to them confidently, "Look, you're never going to have to step foot in the hospital. You're going to come into the surgery center about an hour, hour and a half before your surgery. We're going to do your operation for 2 hours, and then we're going to keep you in the recovery room for an hour or 2, and then you're going to get to go home. And you'll never have to step foot in the hospital. In 5 or 6 hours door to door, your kidney tumor is gone, your prostate cancer is gone." We've now done this for over 700 patients. Nobody's had to be transferred to a hospital or admitted overnight. Our surgery center actually doesn't have overnight beds, so the patients come in knowing that they're going to go home the same day. Again, the idea of just streamlining these robotic surgeries, taking advantage of the fact that they're minimally invasive, this is one of my research interests, and one of the things that that I focus on.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.