Research In Brief

Costs of robot-assisted surgery: While it is unlikely that robot-assisted surgery with devices like Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci system will completely replace conventional surgery, such a substitution would generate $1.5 billion in additional health care costs annually, Gabriel Barbash, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, and Sherry Glied, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, write in the New England Journal of Medicine Aug. 18. Including the amortized costs of the robots, the total would be $2.5 billion. Per procedure (including the amortized cost of the device), the robots add about $3,200. The authors note that the number of robot-assisted procedures performed worldwide has tripled since 2007, and from 2007 to 2009, the number of da Vinci systems installed in the U.S. grew from 800 to 1,400. Barbash and Glied assert that evidence from well designed, large-scale trials or another equally rigorous evaluation is needed to determine which types of patients benefit from open surgical approaches and which from robot-assisted approaches