Hospital CEO Uses His Blog to Ask for Your Advice
Due to clever marketing scheme and a typically statistic-blind consumer base, a new medical device called The da Vinci Robot Surgical System is becoming almost a have-to purchase item for hospitals. This puts Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston is in between a robot and a hard place.
It’s not cheap ($1.5 million) and it shows no proven clinical results for the patient, but if Paul doesn’t purchase one of these it could be disastrous for the institution in his charge. Why?
Patients want it. And no matter how good the level of care is that you’re offering, it doesn’t matter if no one shows up. Or as one of his leading doctors put it:
Due to market forces beyond any of our control, the unfortunate reality is that without a DaVinci robot, BIDMC prostatectomy volume would likely plummet by 2010 and BIDMC would consequently quickly become a non-entity in regional prostate cancer care. This would have dire consequences for BIDMC clinical urology, radiology, radiation oncology, medical oncology, as well as for research in translational oncology. It is unlikely that [we can] fully gauge the breadth and depth of collateral damage that absence of a daVinci robot would bring to our medical center.
What’s Paul to do?
da Vinci Uncoded — or, Surgical Robots, Unite! - Running a Hospital
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