The University of Maryland Faculty Physicians and Axis Research & Technologies launched a joint venture in October to create the nation’s first AI-powered surgical training center.
The partnership is developing a 36,000-square-foot Smart Surgical Performance Center aimed at establishing a new national standard for surgical innovation and education. Students at the center will train on Omnimed’s Smart OR technology, an AI-powered surgical intelligence platform that converts operating room data into actionable insights using multimodal sensors, real-time analytics and cloud-based machine learning.
“There’s really a push in our Maryland healthcare ecosystem to look for ways to improve performance, reduce cost and drive overall efficiency across the spectrum of the academic mission,” Graeme Woodworth, MD, chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland, told Becker’s. “Whether that includes direct patient care or the training of people to do high-performing, low-cost care [without] sacrificing quality. That’s our mantra, our mandate.”
The center aims to achieve this goal by targeting operating room inefficiencies, specifically, as “the operating room minute is the most expensive unit [of time] that’s resourced in healthcare,” Dr. Woodworth said. This is, at least in part, due to the high variability within surgical performance, he added.
“Where data science really comes to bear value is in [applications] where there’s a high degree of variation and complexity, and especially where you’re bringing machine learning in to smooth the curves and create standards and baselines,” Dr. Woodworth said. “We want to perform and create reproducible, robust ways of making sure that when the next patient comes through, they’re going to receive at least that good of, or better, care every single time.”
The vision for the training center begins at the granular level, focusing on individual surgeons and surgical teams, with the overarching goal of creating an ecosystem around surgical performance that has the potential to revolutionize surgical practices nationwide.
The center, where students train on simulations and cadavers, “reflects into the clinical care delivery environment,” Dr. Woodworth said, “Whether those are [ASCs], hospital-based ORs, or, in the future, other places.”
Students will be able to train against a baseline set by top industry standards and understand in real time what aspects of their practice need improvement. This plays on a surgical teaching principle that Dr. Woodworth referred to as “see one, do one, teach one,” in which students watch, perform and then teach surgical procedures as a learning process.
“I think there’s a faster, accelerated learning curve to get that to the top,” he said. With the ability to constantly integrate the highest standard of care, the AI-powered center can more rapidly elevate a trainee’s performance and visualization of a positive procedural outcome.
“I always tell our trainees, ‘Don’t go do something unless you know what “awesome” looks like first,'” Dr. Woodworth said. “Because if you haven’t seen awesome, what’s your mental image of what you’re about to go do? I don’t want some mental image created by you, if you’ve never seen what “great” looks like. We want to make sure people understand what great looks like. But we also want to give them data, and an unbiased way of seeing why they are [off of baseline]. The system and the training environment will give you that kind of feedback.”
The feedback loop will also serve as an enduring benchmark for surgeons already in the field. This could aid leaders in addressing inefficiencies that may arise by providing them with a detailed, updated set of data to reference in what may otherwise be challenging or emotional conversations about a surgeon’s performance.
“It just becomes that kind of a cycling, unbiased data that will help inform performance, care delivery and, in the end, efficiency and quality that I think we all deserve, both as providers delivering care, but certainly, as patients receiving care,” he said. “It can’t just be this sort of free for all, where you hope you get something good, but you don’t really know.”
For Dr. Woodworth, the ability to scale up the ecosystem behind the performance center is paramount in a healthcare system facing a growing cost crisis.
“This is a model for what the future may need to look like,” he said. “[I]n terms of our healthcare system, our healthcare economy, not driving our society broke.”
