Medical Innovations 2022 – Hospital News

How Award-Winning Canadian Technology Can Help Overburdened Hospitals

Anant Ravi

The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to overwhelm Canada’s healthcare system. Since 2020, the accumulated surgical backlog in our hospital continues to cost patients and their families. In Ontario alone, hospitals are facing her one million backlog surgeries this spring, and state doctors are now facing the challenge with innovative and efficient solutions such as nonprofit surgery centers. I am looking for

We have always known that delayed care can have life-threatening consequences for patients, especially cancer patients. The Canadian Cancer Society points out that delaying cancer treatment for just a few weeks can increase the risk of death by about 10%. COVID aside – even other respiratory challenges such as RSV and seasonal flu could push wait times even further in an already strained system.

One way to solve Canada’s overcrowded hospital backlog is to adopt newer and better technologies that help make surgeries more efficient while improving the patient experience.

For example, many hospitals still use wire-guided localization, a method of marking the location of lesions before surgery by inserting a wire into the patient’s breast. It’s a technology that hasn’t changed in over 50 years. Wire-guided localization requires a lot of coordination between the patient, the radiologist, the surgeon, and the pathologist, as the surgery must be performed on the same day. This can create scheduling challenges not just for the hospital itself, but for everyone involved.

Wire-guided localization is particularly difficult and unnerving for patients. The lesion should be marked on the same day as the surgery, resulting in a long day of waiting in the hospital. As part of wire-guided surgery, patients have to fast all the time and may faint. Patients often have to sit in hospital gowns while waiting for the operating room to open. Finally, wires are also known to slip or cut during surgery, which can lead to inaccuracies and additional procedures.

Instead of relying on this method, hospitals should consider techniques that allow for wire-free marker implantation on the day or days before surgery as a way to alleviate the backlog in a more patient-centric and efficient manner. .

One such technology is MOLLI Surgical’s Health Canada-approved MOLLI®. This is a new, precise and easy-to-use technique for soft tissue localization. Winner of a gold medal at the 2022 Medical Design Excellence Awards, named one of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2022 and one of Tech’s Next Big Things by Fast Company, MOLLI replaces traditional wires and We put patients first by providing a better than cable experience. Other localization options. Wireless technology includes MOLLI Marker® detected using the MOLLI Wand®. The MOLLI Tablet® then displays the distance between the tip of the MOLLI Wand and his MOLLI markers, helping the surgeon locate (and accurately remove) lesions more efficiently and improve accuracy. The localization procedure takes about 5 minutes. This gives patients autonomy over scheduling decisions and gives the healthcare system the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing needs.

From a hospital perspective, wireless technology enables a more flexible approach to surgery scheduling, reduces the impact of unplanned delays in radiology, and increases the number of surgeries that can be performed per day. By simply “decoupling” localization from surgery, care teams can improve their workflows for more timely patient care and a better overall experience. When hospitals take this step, radiology department scheduling capacity increases by 34% and breast-conserving surgery programs increase by 41%. In short, wire-free localization provides a better experience for patients before, during and after surgery, for radiologists who help locate lesions, and for surgeons who need to remove them. To do.

For those who work in hospitals, improving workflows, clearing cancer surgery backlogs, and helping people continue to trust their local hospitals are all important concerns. seeks new ways to increase efficiency in the face of these latency challenges, but the changes ultimately adopted are not only efficient for hospitals, they are also patient-centric. It is important to be

Ananth Ravi is President and CEO of MOLLI Surgical..

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