Hybrid Operating Rooms Put the Focus on the Patient

“For me, the hybrid OP is a prime example of an innovation that really puts the patient at the center,” said Alfred Holzgreve, Director of Clinical Research at the Vivantes Network Berlin, at a symposium in Germany’s capital entitled “Hybrid OR: convergence of diagnostics and therapy". He discussed applications of the hybrid OR as well as optimal strategies for setting up these operating theaters with surgeons as well as specialists from hospital administration and industry.
From a medical perspective, one of the advantages of the hybrid OR is that it noticeably streamlines many perioperative and peri-interventional procedures, Holzgreve stressed. Hence, the patient does not need to be repositioned or shifted back and forth as much. Compared to working with a mobile C-arm, the procedures are quicker, meaning the patient benefits not least from spending less time under anesthesia. Preoperative diagnosis is also quicker. What is more, the hybrid OR allows the surgeon a greater degree of precision, stressed Josef Rosenbauer, Managing Director of Diakonie South Westphalia gGmbH: “This means we don't have to carry out follow-up procedures and thus can improve patient safety.”

Many hospitals perform procedures today that they would not have done with mobile C-arms alone. These include fenestrated and branched stent graft implants in the abdominal and thoracic arteries which, especially in the area of the aortic arch, would be scarcely conceivable without the hybrid OR. The hybrid OR is also ideal for complex vascular procedures on the lower leg, where surgery and interventional therapy go hand in hand, he said.
Generally speaking, the hybrid OR plays to its strengths when it comes to closely combining diagnosis and therapy. Interventional stroke treatment was mentioned as a particularly striking example of this. Here, the hybrid OR enables vascular diagnostics and interventional thrombectomy to be performed in one room without the need to relocate the patient. “In this way, the time between a patient's arrival and the thrombectomy could be reduced from 60 to 15 minutes,” said Peter Seitz, Global Head of Surgery of the Business Area Advanced Therapies at Siemens Healthineers AG.

For all its advantages: A hybrid OR does not, however, make sense in every hospital. If the room cannot be used to capacity for the procedures it is best suited for, funds may well be better invested elsewhere. An important part of any hybrid OR planning should therefore be coordination with all relevant specialized fields. “It is difficult to utilize a hybrid OR to capacity with just one specialization. So there needs to be an analysis of the specialization structures first,” Rosenbauer said. At the Diakonie hospital in Siegen, neuro, trauma, and spinal surgeons use the hybrid OR alongside vascular surgeons. Together these specializations may soon utilize two hybrid ORs to capacity: a second operating theater has been equipped to serve as a hybrid OR.