The iteration of robotic platforms that healthcare providers use today, such as CorPath® GRX, are fairly new technologies, but the ideas and motivations that spurred their development have been intrinsic to medicine for more than a century. Providers have long searched for ways to improve the quality of care by increasing efficiency, and even simplistic technologies have contributed to that cause.

Healthcare providers around the world have set out on a mission to achieve one thing: predictability. In the aftermath of a pandemic that has been anything but predictable, every stakeholder in the healthcare continuum has a vested interest in making it easier to predict positive patient outcomes.

Several of our female CorPath^® GRX users from across the globe have contributed to the American College of Cardiology’s Women in Cardiology section. Featured prominently in the “#ChooseCardiology” column, each of the physicians discusses their path to interventional cardiology and the role that robotic-assisted intervention plays. Read on to learn more about these dynamic women.

About an hour outside of Brussels sits a state-of-the-art innovation center that is an ideal venue for Corindus to demonstrate its CorPath^® GRX robot to interventionalists and catheterization laboratory staff. In 2010, Dr. Alexandre Mottrie, a pioneer in robotic surgery, founded the O.L.V. Vattikuti Robotic Surgery Institute (ORSI), a multidisciplinary school of robotic surgery. In its first few years, ORSI implemented two surgical robotic systems to train urologists and gynecologists from Europe. In 2016, ORSI rebranded to become Orsi Academy, and broadened its scope so that stakeholders across several specialties could collaborate to improve the best practices in minimally invasive surgery through training, R&D, and data management. By 2017, Orsi Academy had become – and still is – the largest robotics training center in the world, and recently completed construction of a new state-of-the-art campus.

In October 2019, Dr. Ryan Madder sat in front of a control panel in Waltham, MA, preparing for a robotic-assisted percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) as he has done on countless occasions. Beyond the familiarity of the robotic controls and monitor with fluoroscopic images of the heart, this was anything but a typical procedure. While Dr. Madder sat outside Boston, he was about to attempt PCI on simulated patients located in New York and San Francisco.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented strain on the US healthcare system, forcing innovation to move at an accelerated pace and resulting in new applications for existing technologies and some entirely new solutions for patient care. It especially impacted hospitals who were inundated with COVID-19 patients, shining a light on the need to offer treatment options outside of the hospital setting. The CorPath^® GRX System is one example of an existing technology that has helped cardiologists treat their patients in new and innovative ways.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic will be felt long after the number of cases has decreased and the world has adjusted to the new normal. Lasting effects on business, daily life and the medical sector will influence the way society moves forward – and significant changes to the healthcare field and its standard protocols are to be expected. One of the departments that will likely undergo shifts as a result of coronavirus is cardiology, and specifically, the cardiac catheterization lab.