Robotic surgeries are safer, but costlier

Patients who have robot-assisted surgeries on their kidneys or prostate have shorter hospital stays and a lower risk of having a blood transfusion or dying, Reuters reports.

The analysis, which appeared in the Journal of Urology, compared increasingly common robotic surgery with two other techniques for the same surgery, and found that the direct costs can be up to several thousand dollars higher for the robotic type.

Touted as less invasive and more efficient, robotic surgeries typically use a laparoscopic or 'keyhole surgery" approach, in which tools and a tiny video camera are inserted into the body through one or two small incisions.

Robotic surgery replaces a surgeon's hands with ultra-precise tools at the ends mechanical arms, all operated by the surgeon from a console.

"I think the take home message is that robotic [surgery], looking at our study, had certain beneficial outcomes compared to open and laparoscopic procedures," Jim Hu, a study leader at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston, said about the procedure.

Hu and his team analyzed surgery data from a national government database to see if the costlier surgeries were cost effective with extra benefits over older techniques.

Among five percent of the men who had open surgery needed blood transfusion, compared to less than two percent of men who had robot-assisted surgery. The open-surgery group also stayed in the hospital about one day longer that the robotic group. Similar results were for the people who had their kidneys removed

With robotic prostate removal costing about $10,000 on average, it  cost about $700 more than laparoscopic surgery and $1,100 more than open surgery. But for kidney removal, robotic surgery cost $13,900 which is $2700 more than laparoscopic and $1,300 more than open surgery.

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