AdventHealth Team Successfully Tests Remote Robotic Surgery

Roger Smith, PhD, and his team at Florida-based AdventHealth Nicholson Center recently conducted a successful Department of Defense (DoD)-funded trial on remote robotic surgery. Smith, who is chief technology officer at the center, and his team used a dedicated fiber optic campus network to perform the remote robotic surgery. “The Infrastructure we used for the trial was fiber optic cable. We didn't create a VPN [virtual private network] or something private for our traffic. We just went IP to IP with whatever traffic was on the network,” Smith told HITInfrastructure.com. DoD funded the trial because the department is interested in developing robotics surgery to treat solders in war zones, he explained. Smith explained that his team wanted to answer two questions in the robotic surgery trial:  What is the latency of the data between the two points of the system? And what level of latency can the surgeon tolerate and still do the procedure? The trial was conducted at the AdventHealth campus in the Orlando area, Smith noted. “We streamed the robotic surgery data back and forth between two points within our system … We found out from our IT team as we were doing this that the network infrastructure for the campuses is in a protected and trusted environment. So, we didn't cross over into the public internet between our campuses,” he related.