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EDITOR'S PAGE
Dan O Connor
Robot's Reach in the OR Exceeds Its Grasp
Sales reps worked every angle to get surgeons to use the da Vinci.
B
usiness is brisk at Intuitive Surgical. By Intuitive's count, 1,371
U.S. hospitals have purchased a $2.5 million da Vinci surgical
robot. Many of those hospitals have doubled up on their investment,
buying a second robot. Not included in the purchase price are several
hundred thousand dollars in annual maintenance fees.
Worldwide, nearly 500,000 procedures were performed robotically last
year. You'd think the alleged clinical benefits of robotic surgery over traditional laparoscopy — more precision, less invasive, better outcomes
— would be driving this breakneck growth.
But you'd be only partly right. And sadly mistaken.
We can attribute at least part of robotic surgery's growth to Intuitive's
greedy, groping sales force that regards surgeons not as customers but
as conquests and views patients not as people but as cases to be converted. "Salesmen in the Surgical Suite," a report last month in The
New York Times, pulls back the curtain on how Intuitive's sales force
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