Dr. Michael Ast has accomplished a great deal in his career.
After completing his medical degree at Temple University School of Medicine, he completed his residency training in orthopaedic surgery at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Now, Dr. Ast is an Orthopaedic Surgeon at the Mercer County Surgery Center in Lawrenceville, NJ, and conducts research and case studies on hip replacement surgery. He is also fellowship trained in Adult Reconstruction and Joint Replacement Surgery from the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York City.
Due to his specialty in primary, complex, and revision total joint replacement, he’s become involved with OrthAlign, a company that develops advanced technologies delivering healthier and more pain-free lifestyles to joint replacement patients.
Here Dr. Ast discusses his experience working with OrthAlign thus far:
Question: How has OrthAlign technology impacted your ASC's joint practice?
Dr. Michael Ast: OrthAlign technology for total and partial knee replacements has had a three-part impact on our ASC practice. First, there is no upfront capital cost and minimal cost, which allows us to bring the highest level of clinically proven navigation to our patients without the costs associated with large console navigation or robotics. Secondly, the use of alignment technology allows us to streamline our sterile processing and significantly reduce the number of trays needed per case which helps decrease costs and increase efficiency. Finally, the OrthAlign technique allows the surgeon to avoid violating the intramedullary canal on our total knee replacement patients which has been shown to decrease blood loss and complication risks. This is of the utmost importance in ambulatory total knee replacement.
Q: Could you describe the clinical benefits of OrthAlign technology?
MA: There are many peer-reviewed studies that have proven that OrthAlign technology provides significantly improved coronal and sagittal alignment when compared to conventional instrumentation and equivalent results when compared to large console navigation without the associated hassles. Also, as I mentioned earlier, not violating the intramedullary canal of the femur carries several proven benefits to our patients.
Q: Can you describe the economics of OrthAlign? How does this compare to other navigation systems
MA: The best part about integrating OrthAlign technology into ASC joint replacements is that there is no upfront capital costs and only a minimal expense per case, which are both important in the ASC environment. We evaluated several advanced technologies for our ASC and only the OrthAlign technology made sense in economics of an ASC.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to share about your ASC's experience with OrthAlign technology?
MA: Ambulatory joint replacement patients are usually the youngest, healthiest and most active patients in a surgeon's practice, and we want the absolute best outcomes for them. However, it's important to remember that these patients have also been shown to have the highest risk of revision, and the use of advanced technology for knee replacements has been proven to reduce this risk. Because of this fact, I believe that every patient that is a candidate for an ASC knee replacement should have their surgery performed with some type of advanced technology, and OrthAlign is the simplest and most cost effective one we have found.
For more information on how OrthAlign can help build or grow your surgery center joint practice, you can visit OrthAlign.com/ambulatory-surgery-centers/