Urologists share advice on incorporating Aquablation procedure for BPH

In this video, Matthew E. Sterling, MD, and Brian Friel, MD, share advice for urologists looking to incorporate Aquablation into their practice. Friel and Sterling are urologists with MidLantic Urology.

Transcription:

What advice would you give other providers looking to incorporate Aquablation into their practice?

Sterling: I think it's important that they go visit someone that does them. Go to the operating room, see it in person. We both went to a simulation lab, so I think that's also important because you're going to get an expert that's going to talk to you about it, you're going to get hands on before you actually start doing it. You can go through things with people that do them. And if you're lucky enough to be in a place with other urologists, I would try to do it with someone. I think Brian and my's experience is probably unique in most places. But there are a lot of parts of the country where there's a lot of urologists. So I think if you could figure out a way to have multiple people do them, you get the advantage of doing more together at the start, so your learning curve is a little shorter. It's good to be able to bounce ideas off of each other for new things. That being said, the company has been very supportive. And so if we wanted to talk to experts at night and have a conference call, we've been able to do that. Just make sure you're trained and you're prepared for it. But that's anything with surgery.

Is there anything you would like to add?

Friel: I'll say one thing, and I think Matt would probably echo this as well is that, we haven't necessarily, because we're newer to this and we're trying to make sure we're really selecting the correct patients that we're comfortable with doing, we've kind of tapped our volumes. But there are plenty of urologists who will do an Aquablation on much larger prostates that typically weren't an option, really, for a TURP. That's something for the future that we'll see, but it is a nice potential additive to the Aquablation sphere that was just not really a great option previously.

Sterling: I have a few coming up that are larger for sure. For TURP, my cut-off is like 80 or 90 grams for a traditional TURP, and then I'll send it to my partner to do a robotic surgery. But you always get a bunch of patients in that like 90 to 100 gram -120 gram window that previously I was having them go for robotic surgery, and now you can argue no incisions, I can do an Aquablation and get good results. And so, again, I think we'll see what the real-world data shows in a few years but the the data that are out there is really good and encouraging. So that's why we picked up on this and wanted to do more of them.

This transcription was edited for clarity.