By Michelle Crouch
Co-published with The Charlotte Ledger
Atrium Health’s new surgical training center in Charlotte is off to a fast start.
In just six weeks, IRCAD North America has brought in 932 health care providers from 14 countries for training, said Rasu Shrestha, chief innovation and commercialization officer at Advocate Health, Atrium’s parent company.
That puts it on track to train roughly 8,000 professionals in its first year, nearly matching IRCAD’s flagship center in France and ahead of IRCAD training centers in six other countries, Shrestha said.
Known in French as the Institut de Recherche contre les Cancers de l’Appareil Digestif (Research Institute Against Digestive Cancer), IRCAD is known for providing surgeons and other health care providers with practical experience in the latest surgical techniques and robotic technologies.
The Charlotte site, which opened in September, is the only IRCAD facility in North America. It spans four floors and 120,000 square feet in the 10-story research building of Atrium’s $1.5 billion medical innovation district, The Pearl, which opened earlier this year.
Dana Telem, section head of general surgery at University of Michigan Health and president-elect of Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, said what sets the Charlotte center apart is that it brings a mix of companies, industries and surgical specialties under one roof, creating a space where collaboration and innovation happen naturally.
“Most training centers are specific to one device or one company,” Telem said.
Christopher Schlachta, a Canadian surgeon who is the immediate past president of the society, said it’s also larger than most other training facilities. Its multiple auditoriums, mock surgical suites and training areas means “there can be multiple courses going on at the same time,” he said.
Schlachta and Telum said the society has signed a partnership agreement with IRCAD and plans to hold many of its professional development courses there, allowing it to expand its programming.
In addition to IRCAD, The Pearl campus includes office and lab space for biotech companies, the Charlotte campus of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the Carolinas College of Health Science, which trains nurses and other health care professionals.
“A super magnet” packed with technology
Shrestha said the developers of The Pearl planned for IRCAD to be a “super magnet” that would attract talent, investors, industry, startups, clinicians and researchers.
It has already delivered, he said, drawing big name partners such as Stryker, Medtronic and Siemens Healthineers.
The companies bring in equipment and work with IRCAD to develop training courses for physicians and other surgical staff. They also do research and development on site.
“Right after it was announced … we had dozens of inbounds from some of the top surgeons wanting to move to Charlotte,” Shrestha said. “And soon thereafter we started to attract partners in industry.”
Medical and nursing students, residents and fellows also have opportunities to learn in the space.
Ansley Ricker, a surgery resident at Atrium’s Carolinas Medical Center, was among 34 residents and fellows who took a minimally invasive surgery course at IRCAD in September.
She said she was able to practice using equipment and instruments she had never seen before and to learn from highly respected surgeons.
“They were actually watching me work and making little tweaks on my operative ability,” she said. “I took everything that I learned, and the following week I was using those same techniques in the operating room. I feel so much more prepared when I operate on patients, just from the techniques I learned here.”
Hands-on and high-tech
A media tour of the facility on Oct. 29 highlighted some of its high-tech features:
- Three large auditoriums can stream live surgeries with simultaneous translation in seven languages. Trainees “can watch the actual live cases in the hospitals wherever they are done,” said Dionisios Vrochides, executive director of IRCAD North America and professor of transplant surgery at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
- Two surgical ballrooms feature 13 robotic operating stations where physicians can practice advanced techniques simultaneously. That’s very different from a traditional “operating theater,” where students learn a new technique by watching a single surgery from above, rather than practicing hands-on skills.
- Hybrid operating rooms combine imaging technology with robots that can do minimally invasive surgeries, so surgeons can check their progress in real time.
- “Hugo,” a futuristic, four-armed robot, lets doctors perform complex surgeries from a video console. Already in use in Europe and awaiting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it’s giving IRCAD surgeons an early glimpse of what’s expected to be the next thing in minimally invasive surgery, Vrochides said.
One thing that sets the robot apart is that it allows surgeons to operate from a console rather than hunching over a patient for hours, extending their capabilities and the number of years they can work, Vrochides explained.
“People do not understand what the toll is for surgeons like us to have strain on our backs, to strain our necks,” he said.
Although the Hugo robot would be used for urologic, gynecologic and general surgical procedures, Charlotte’s IRCAD facility also offers training on other types of surgical devices, including some that can be used in cardiovascular and neurological procedures.
Health care systems are increasingly adopting robotic devices. They boost a hospital’s surgical volumes by an average of 37 percent and can reduce the length of patient hospital stays, often with similar or slightly improved patient outcomes, according to a 2022 study.
However, with each robot priced anywhere from $50,000 to $2.5 million and the additional costs to hospitals and physician training required, they can also drive higher prices for patients, research shows.
VIDEO TOUR: Take a look around IRCAD North America in this Charlotte Ledger-produced video.
A hub for innovation
The Pearl was designed as a hub where research, training and innovation could come together, and Shrestha said that “magic” is already happening.
He highlighted a “stroke robot” that Siemens and Stryker are jointly developing that would allow emergency medical technicians to begin treating stroke patients in the ambulance, before they even reach the hospital.
The idea, he said, is that EMTs could connect the device to a patient’s femoral artery, allowing a doctor to guide the robot remotely through the blood vessels to the brain to dissolve the clot.
The Pearl’s spirit of collaboration also extends to the building’s lobby, where a community coffee bar and open seating areas are designed to encourage “intentional collisions” between surgeons, investors, students and community members, Shrestha said.
This article is part of a partnership between The Charlotte Ledger and North Carolina Health News to produce original health care reporting. You can support this effort with a tax-deductible donation.
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