Formula One Innovates Surgery

Surgeries become 4 to 20 times faster.

The Times reports that a London hospital has reduced the time to perform a variety of procedures by 75 percent to 95 percent. Their inspiration? Formula One Pit Stops. The patients are processed in parallel in High Intensity Theaters (HIT) rather than one after another. The article reports that “Under the innovative model, two operating theatres run side by side and as soon as one procedure is finished the next patient is already under anaesthetic and ready to be wheeled in.” “We delete any downtime. We get rid of any time that the operating theatre does not have a patient in it being operated on” noted Kariem El-Boghdadly, the consultant anesthetist who designed the program with his colleague Imran Ahmad.

Since 1990 F-1 pit stops have gotten five times faster declining 80 percent from 8.95 seconds to 1.78 seconds. Pit stops are getting 5 percent faster every year on a compound basis.

The Times article noted that:

• Performing an entire week’s operations in a single day.

• Reducing the time to sterilize the operating theatre from 40 minutes to less than two.

• The surgical team got through 21 operations on 20 patients and finished by lunchtime. Normally they would do six such procedures and be working all day.

• Operated on three months’ worth of breast cancer patients in five days.

• Performed a week’s worth of robotic-assisted prostatectomies in one day.

• Performed 12 knee replacements in a day. Normally do three, four if lucky.

Productivity gains range from 300 percent to 1,900 percent. Even socialized medical systems can enjoy dramatic productive gains if people are free to innovate.

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Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.