In a US First, We Enter 'a New Era of Surgery'

"Sometimes you can be in two places at the same time—sort of." That's how WQAD frames what AdventHealth calls a US first in hospital-to-hospital telesurgery, in which urologist Dr. Vipul Patel removed a 66-year-old man's prostate using a robotic system while Patel sat at a console in Celebration, Florida, and the cancer patient lay on an operating table in Minneola, about 35 miles away, per ABC News. A second surgeon stood by in the Minneola OR as a safeguard.

The Food and Drug Administration-authorized study is testing whether remote robot-assisted procedures can be safely scaled. Patel says the goal is to chip away at the way ZIP codes dictate access to top-tier surgical care, though he cautions that safety, reliability, and technical performance still need to be fully vetted. Previous trial runs linked Orlando and Luanda, Angola, about 7,000 miles apart. If anyone was going to perform this particular surgery, Patel seems to be a decent choice: An AdventHealth release says he's done about 21,000 robot-led prostatectomies. "We are entering a new era of surgery," Patel says.