With enabling technology common in orthopedics, the next game-changing innovations will focus on outpatient access and personalization, Antonia Chen, MD, and Michael Meneghini, MD, said.
Dr. Chen, current president of the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons, and Dr. Meneghini, immediate past president of the organization, spoke about their outlooks for orthopedic innovation on an upcoming episode of the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedics Podcast.”
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: What are the most interesting innovations in hip and knees that you’re following?
Dr. Michael Meneghini: Most of our stress is not within surgery. Maybe in the first couple years when you’re out of fellowship, it is. But once you get beyond that and you get relatively comfortable in the operating room, the remainder of your stress is really practice, operations, workflow, etc. AI and utilizing that will be great. In terms of surgical techniques, I think the future is enabling technology whether it’s robotics or navigation.
Since robotics is sort of a mainstay now, I see two big pillars of innovation. Payers and the government … are pushing everything into the outpatient ASC world. So how do you bring enabling tech in an ASC-friendly modality that can help the surgeons drive value to their everyday practice and to their patients? Seeing more patients in the ASC is innovative, and that involves clinical care pathways.
Then how do we deliver our enabling technology to do things like personalized knee replacement? How do we bring that into the ASC? I see those as two real opportunities for innovation.
Dr. Antonia Chen: Enabling technology is probably the most common thing that most of us are talking about in any modality possible. With the enabling tech, what we really need is data. We need to know what it’s like to personalize a joint.
The way I do joints now is not how I did joints when I started practice. Whether it be how we align our knees or how we do our hips, that has changed even in the time span of 12 years. I think in the next 12 years, we’re going to keep it iterating.
In every other field of medicine, there’s more and more personalized medicine, and we’re going to start doing that in orthopedics. How I do a knee replacement in you, and how I do a replacement in Dr. Meneghini is going to be very different based on their activity, their expectations and anatomy. We will take a lot more into account, but we’ll need data to be able to make these observations and to make these corrections. So I think hip and knee surgery is going to become a little bit more specialized.
Because people just say, “Well, it’s just a hip replacement and just a knee replacement.” And I say actually, we think about each patient, and we fit size for each patient, and we do try to make it more customized.
I also think the innovations are going to become either more minimally invasive, whatever that means, or more cartilage preserving. Over time, we’re going to use less metal and plastic and use maybe more biological materials. It still might involve metal and plastic, but maybe thinner materials, or more flexible materials, or things that feel more like the natural joint. We’re not there yet, but it’s something we’re going to start trending towards more.
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