Surgery Without an Incision (ft. Gianluca Torregrossa)

A week in the hospital used to be standard after heart bypass surgery. Dr. Gianluca Torregrossa sends his patients home in a day or two, and they are back at work within a week. One of them played 36 holes of golf two weeks out and sent a photo.

He does the operation robotically, without cutting the chest open. Surgeons tried this in the early 2000s and abandoned it as too difficult and too expensive. He picked it up anyway and has now done more than 100, including the first ever performed on a pregnant patient.

Gianluca is Director of the Robotic Coronary Artery Surgery Program at Cleveland Clinic. Before that he trained in Italy and spent nine months in Sudan operating with the humanitarian organization EMERGENCY.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, he tells Edward Marx why he thinks technology's job is to simplify technique rather than replace the surgeon, what Sudan taught him that medical school could not, and why he believes healthcare is running out of time to fix its leadership problem.

Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/