Nowadays, cutting-edge technology is employed in surgery to reduce incision size and surgical risks, allowing patients to spend less time in the hospital and recover faster. SiELITE, the center of robotic-assisted hip and knee joint replacement center, has been working very hard on overcoming the challenges for decades and finally came up with the state-of-the-art solution in order to enhance community wellness and provide accessible care to all Thai people.
SiELITE, Center for hip and joint replacement surgery
SiELITE or Siriraj, Excellence, Longevity, Innovation, technology, and education is one of sixteen centers of excellence in Siriraj Hospital providing hip and knee joint replacement surgery since 1975. Over the last 40 years, the center has performed thousands of hips and knees arthroplasty. SiELITE seeks to advance research and education in order to produce long-term value for society in addition to the goal of delivering excellent accessible care services in collaboration with a holistic multidisciplinary team. From this strong determination, the center strives to integrate systematic data collection along with credential international research publications and skillful robotic surgical operation to increase efficient care for patients.
Robotic-Assisted Arthroplasty Surgery
Currently, SiELITE offers robotic-assisted surgery that is more effective, less costly, and less time-consuming for the patient. Instead of waiting 1-2 years due to limited operating room capacity, the patients can receive care sooner. Furthermore, the center provides same-day robotic-assisted surgery, which allows the patients to go back home on the same day. As robotic-assisted surgery advances, it raises the promise of a one-time joint replacement procedure that will enable the longevity and quality of the patient’s life.
The Advantages of Robotic-Assisted Arthroplasty Surgery
1. Precise alignment position- which is less than 5 millimeters or 0.5 degrees when compared to up to 3 degrees of traditional surgery. Consequently, robotic surgery can reduce the deviation to less than 1%.
2. Joint alignment balancing – In arthroplasty, the joint replacement must be appropriately aligned and balanced with the soft tissue envelope. A calculated figure produced by the robotic-assisted system’s balanced alignment can help surgeons immediately plan the procedure and customize joint replacements.
3. Safety – The surgeon can see the incision clearly, reducing the chance of soft tissue damage.
The robotic-assisted system regulates the instrument so that it does not deviate from the preoperative target using the ‘Heptic’ operation, which is a high-accuracy operation with rapid response during the surgery.
Siriraj Joint Care Program
Future Data-Driven Dynamic Treatment, Patient data collection enables medical professionals to understand patients’ holistic perspectives and use it to develop specific treatments to improve patient outcomes individually. However, gathering data could be laborious, held down by unstructured data, or incomplete collection. The team at SiELITE recognized the problem and found a solution by introducing the “Siriraj Joint Care” program to handle the patient database. The data collected by this application provides a comprehensive picture of the patient to the SiELITE team, enabling them to cover all stages of therapy: preoperative, postoperative, and follow-up stages, improving not only service but also patient outcomes.
In the future, the application will be developed to be telemedicine-ready in order to improve performance and service accessibility.
