Surgery 4.0 - speculations about the concept of Verb Surgical

A pair of nice articles appeared from Khateed on LinkedIn about Verb Surgical (part 1, part 2):

"...Verb is trying to do something big.

Changing the healthcare system overall is a dangerous journey to embark on.

Verb CEO Scott Huennekens stated: "And robotics is only part of that. I think Intuitive defines itself as a robotics company. We're not a robotics company".

Verb's aims to bring down the cost of surgery, empowering all surgeons with access to technology to perform the most complex surgery, and making it available across the world.  This all starts with a focus, or a base offering to the market.  In the process, surgery will be "democratized".  Something like that is impossible.  Until it's not.  And that's how revolutions get started. 

• Surgery 1.0 was open surgery. 
• Surgery 2.0 was the introduction of minimally invasive surgery. 
• Surgery 3.0 was the first generation of surgical robotics. 
• Surgery 4.0 is the enabling of a digital surgical platform coupled with robots.

This is where things start to get interesting.

...

If done properly by educating the market and seeding the minds of surgeons, the resonance of Verb's launch in a few years will be felt throughout the surgical universe.

This isn't going to be the same as introducing a procedure like Lap Chole with a few surgeons adopting and others following suit.

This requires a more complex approach, one that markets to the subconscious before the conscious mind is even introduced to anything.

With enough force in the tear they created, the market will vacuum, drawing other robotic companies into the new category.

Those who do not evolve and adapt will be subject to economic Darwinism and will die off.

...

When Verb Surgical takes this violent step from the surgical robotic universe and into a liberated future of digital surgery, something remarkable happens; the robotic world vacuums.

That means the world of robotics adapts and evolves into a new category, Digital Surgery, where robotics is only one part of the surgery. If Verb Surgical creates a mass movement among surgeons strong enough, it will vacuum other companies through the wormhole."

Scott Huennekens said:

"At the beginning, we got everybody a t-shirt that said, "Are You a Verb?" We basically said over the first 30, 60, 90, 120 days, we're not going to definitively define what the culture is. We know that we're going to abide by these 3 Rs of respect, responsiveness, results, but we're really going to work on this together as a team. We've rolled that out and it's continued to evolve and we now call it "I M VRB". The "I" is integrity, the "M" is the "m" in team, "V" is voice—the voice of the patients, the physicians, the employees, the shareholders—the "R" is results, the "B" is bold. We’ve had a lot of fun with that and it reinforces the way we draw our org[anizational] charts upside down with the patients and physicians on top and I'm at the bottom."  

"The Verb Surgical full working prototype is still anticipated by the end of 2016, but Huennekens pointed out it won't be unveiled publicly then. The system will be viewed privately by executives from Google/Alphabet and Johnson and Johnson at that time." 

"We want to take it to the next level, and if we manage to deliver a system which is built on making better decisions based on advanced analytics, analyzing every decision that was taken by every machine as it’s done,” Fitchet explained, “we bring the opportunity to bring the level of outcomes up as well, meaning every surgeon can get the results of those high operators in say the top 5% of their field."

Verb Surgical is hiring for numerous positions.

Source: LinkedIn, MDDI online, MassDevice