100 devices, 60 hospitals: More often, doctors visit bedside via robot

The machines cut response times for intensivists and surgeons, allowing them to see patients more quickly.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. Feb. 19, 2007.

From miles away, Richard D. Fessler, MD, has listened to a patient's thumping heartbeat.

The Michigan neurosurgeon also has pulled over his car, hurried into Starbucks and hooked up his computer to see a patient at a distant hospital.

Both encounters came by way of a robot.

Dr. Fessler is among a growing number of physicians using robots to connect with patients. The devices may look like fancy kin to vacuum cleaners, but their high-tech circuitry lets a stethoscope be attached so a doctor can hear someone's heart from a remote location. With a laptop, joystick and wireless connection, doctors log on to the robot from coffee shops, home or elsewhere and roll it into a hospital room to check on a patient.

"It saves me an hour or so going back to the hospital, and it allows me to be there immediately," said Dr. Fessler, medical director of the Michigan Stroke Network, a group of hospitals that provides stroke care across the state. "It's actually a lifesaver, in a way, for me."

And for patients. Besides making rounds, the machines are dispatched to emergency departments and intensive care units. Specialists in medical centers lend expertise through robots placed in hospitals that have no specialists on hand.

"I don't think this robot can be viewed as a replacement for a human being. However, this may be one more tool we have to extend and improve health care delivery to our patients," said Li-Ming Su, MD, director of laparoscopic and robotic urologic surgery at the Brady Urological Institute at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.