Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Manager's Guide to Joint Replacement - January 2016

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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robot, but to ask third-party payers or Medicare to foot the bill is ludi- crous when we have lots of public health problems that need more resources dedicated to them. We need to invest in surgeons who get poor outcomes by giving them robotics. But those surgeons often operate in low-volume hospitals that can't afford the technology. It's a paradoxical situation. How important is proper patient selection in joint replacement? Outpatient surgery is enabled by superior surgical technique and excellent perioperative management, which includes proper pain con- trol. Proper patient selection is a huge knowledge gap among orthope- dic surgeons. You're going to get poor outcomes if you don't pick the right patients — even if you work with a robot and St. Peter comes down from heaven to assist. Where do partial knee replacements fit in? Even though approximately one-third of patients who need knee replacements would benefit from a partial joint replacement, only about 5% get it done, mostly because surgeons get paid less money for partial knees than they do for total knees. If you become a niche provider of partial knee replacements, you'll have a 6-month-long waiting list. OSM Dr. Kusuma (skk2002ga@gmail.com) is a surgical consultant and former director of adult reconstruction at the Grant Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 6 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 7 3

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