The Northeast Georgia Medical Center (NGMC) Gainesville is the first hospital in Georgia to perform robotic surgery with the new da Vinci 5 surgical system.
Dr. Ron Lewis, MD, medical director of perioperative services at NGMC and general surgeon with Northeast Georgia Physicians Group, performed the first procedure using the new system from Intuitive Surgical.
“There are significant advances on this system that we’re only just beginning to explore,” Lewis said.
Intuitive states that this new robot has roughly 10,000 times the computing power of the current robot.
“The information that we are going to be able to get from that is going to be able to improve patient outcomes in our opinion,” Lewis said.
The first surgery done with the new system was an umbilical hernia repair, which Lewis called a “simple” procedure, but also stated the da Vinci 5 excels in simple and complex procedures.
Speaking of those lengthier surgeries, Lewis says that the new system allows them to do more complex things through smaller incisions, but the system still requires the “skill and the knowledge” of the surgeon to offer quality patient outcomes.
The system’s every movement is completely controlled by the person doing the procedure.
NGMC acquired its first da Vinci system in 2008 and has expanded to nine robotic surgical systems across two campuses in Gainesville and Braselton.
NGMC has more than 50 trained surgeons on their staff who have performed more than 24,000 robotic procedures combined.
