Florida Hospital has an impressive Robotics training center. An obvious
location as doctors like to go to fun places for their continuing education, Orlando would certainly fit that bill. The day after my catheter removal I asked if I could get a tour of their Nicholson Center eductional facility. They had some down time that afternoon so they arranged for me to meet the coordinator for a stroll around. It was pretty impressive.
This facility is used for continuing education and training in robotics and laproscopic surgery for doctors worldwide. They have a huge hotel ballroom type room where they can have multi-hundred person presentations and big dinners, etc.. Then a number of conference rooms for small classes and discussions and they can pipe the video from the robotic OR's in the hospital into these conference rooms for teaching. All as exptected for a continuing ed location. The cool part begins when getting behind the scenes. They have 7 da Vinci robotic systems. Things we saw:
- A practice lab that has full laproscopic setup for over a dozen tables
- A practice lab with a number of da Vinci systems
- 2 fully operational OR's with da Vinci systems. These OR's are capable of becoming sterile for emergency use, though they do not keep them in sterile state because they are working with cadavers and animals daily.
- A dry lab with 2 da Vinci robots. This lab is used for gaining basic skills so not using organic tissue. They have all sorts of things to pick up and manipulate to learn system control. They even have the game "Operation" as it needs tight manipulations and gives immediate failure feedback.
I was amazed how small the da Vinci instruments actually are. These were smaller than I anticipated from watching the videos online. Each tool is maybe 1/2 inch long past the "wrist" and maybe 1/8 inch wide. They mentioned they had a group of high school kids in last week and were impressed with how quickly they picked up the motions and control. Today's video gaming youth just adapt to this stuff naturally.
The other cool thing in the dry lab was two da Vinci simulators (named Mimic) also made by Intuitive Surgical. At first I was surpised, then when one thinks about it, it makes total sense. We have full motion simulators for aircraft that make it feel like you are in the real airplane (I'm a pilot, your brain is convinced you are in the real thing), so why not for a surgical system. Doctors can practice a complete da Vinci surgery in cyberspace. All sorts of complications can be included just like an aircraft simulator. Large prostates, overweight individual, difficult nerve seperation, bleeding, etc.. Of course, any part of the body can be practiced in the simulator.
He also mentioned that Intuitive Surgical had a couple technicians full time on staff at the hospital in case anything goes down on a robot in an OR or the educational center. I got the impression Intuitive staffs a tech at every hospital with an active robot, though I'm not sure of that. That's a lot of cost, but then again, if something happens to that robot during a procedure that would be bad. And even between procedures costs the hospital a lot in down time waiting for a tech. At $1.7M per da Vinci plus the annual maintenance contract costs, they can probably afford the tech costs built into the maintenance contract.
Overall it was cool to see the systems. We can't see a surgery live due to HIPAA rules and more, so this is the next best thing.