Robotics Procedure Helping People Recover From Joint Replacement Surgery

Tulsa Bone and Joint’s Union Pines Surgery Center is now the first ambulatory surgery center in Oklahoma to have the Mako SmartRobotics technology.

With the Mako SmartRobotics system, surgeons can better see how surgeries like a knee replacement will impact the entire body.

"What the Mako allows us to do, the way I explain it to my patients, is it allows us to know the consequences of the bony cuts we're going to make, before we actually make them," said Dr. Scott Reid, an Orthopedic Surgeon.

This data can help surgeons decide the best course of action for each patient, because everyone does not react the same way.

This is especially helpful in situations where the result can be hard to predict.

"The problem with soft tissue releases is that they're not very predictable,” said Reid. “You may think when you're in the operating room that you've balanced the knee really well, ultimately that may not actually be the case."

Finding potential problems earlier, can change the recovery process, and the lives, of patients.

"One outlier, if we have one patient out of 100 that has a poor outcome because we didn't get the implants in exactly the way they needed to be, that's a big burden to that patient and we want to try to eliminate those as much as possible,” said Reid. “But there's a big cost to the system.”

Reid says this technology has been in hospitals for nearly a decade, but using the Mako at Tulsa Bone and Joint’s surgery center can benefit more patients.

"Now, I think we've got every insurance contract that we have, to include Medicare and all the other subsidiaries of Medicare, we have the technology available to them now,” said Reid.

He’s excited about the future of this technology and the number of people it can help in the future.

"If we can use this technology to provide a more consistent outcome to our patients, ultimately that's what we're looking for,” said Reid.

The first two knee replacements using this surgery were performed successfully last Thursday.