$4 trillion healthcare system supporting a $500 billion surgical industry

The Google and Johnson & Johnson announcement about their collaboration to create a new-age operating room coming out the very same week that we aired our Healthcare Robotics

webcast and also issued our Healthcare Robotics: 2015-2020 research report (both Thursday, March 26), when taken together, offer up a fascinating window into the future of surgery and healthcare medicine.

In fact, our Healthcare Robotics research reports for 2013, 2014 and 2015 provide a three-year thread by which you can follow the emergence of these disruptive technologies as they begin to transform the healthcare system.

Follow the thread and squint your eyes a bit, and you?ll see the emerging Google/J&J new-age OR hovering in the near distance.

It?s an OR that will be very much needed, given the fact that ?80 to 100 million procedures are performed annually ? a per-capita rate that?s some 50 percent higher than in the European Union,? said Dr. John Birkmeyer, a researcher and adjunct professor at the Dartmouth Institute and in the university’s Community & Family Medicine program. And they are dramatically on the increase!

A price check on four of the most common procedures reveals the inflationary trends hitting ORs since 2009:

• Hernia repair, up 16 percent, with a “total fair price” of $5,056
• Gall bladder removal, up 21 percent, with a “total fair price” of $5,532
• Hysterectomy, up 19 percent, with a “total fair price” of $11,780
• Hip replacement, up 24 percent, with a “total fair price” of $22,606

Source: Healthcare Bluebook

Surgical volume, efficiency, efficacy, well-being, quality of life, cost control, all hang in the balance of the disruptive, new surgical paradigm offered by robotics, 3D printing and big data.

This new alliance between Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) goes well beyond just putting a new tool or two into a surgeon’s toolbox; this is a whole new way of delivering healthcare. It’s exciting, and could get very interesting very quickly.

Want to get quickly and thoroughly up to speed on what?s happening? Here?s the formula to follow:

First:

See WSJ: Google Moves to the Operating Room in Robotics Deal With J&J

Then:

See (free) webcast: Healthcare Robotics: Trends, Opportunities & Challenges

Read: Healthcare Robotics 2015-2020

Free download: Sample Preview of Healthcare Robotics 2015-2020

While you are at it, sign up for our free RBR Weekly Newsletter

Once you?ve absorbed some or all of the above, sit back and filter it all through this brief six-minute video.

Conversations with Tomorrow: Dr. Daniel Kraft

“Curing half of the world’s known cancers, granting movement to the paralyzed, preventing Alzheimer’s. Visionary medical expert Dr. Daniel Kraft believes all of this and more can happen by 2064. In this first film in our ?Conversations with Tomorrow? series, take a glimpse at the future of medicine and its impact on our lives.”

Google?s fingerprints

In Dr. Kraft?s view of healthcare by 2064, it?s easy to see the potential for Google?s fingerprints to be everywhere in an operating room from search algorithms targeted at medical records, imaging, and surgical complications to Google glass to driverless car technology to sifting big data to Siri-style voice communications.

All of the elements and more are in Google?s quiver of high-tech arrows, but it all needs to be coordinated and brought to bear at a single task; surgery is an ideal place.

So, what?s up with Dr. Google?

Although surgical robotics already has the likes of Intuitive Surgical, Corindus, Mako, Titan and all of the OR machines operated from a console removed from the patient, they still only account for a fraction of the 80 to 100 million procedures annually performed in the U.S. There are millions more surgeries awaiting assistance from robotics, not from a console across the room but during patient-side operations where surgeons could use a good helping hand as well.

To coordinate this Google/Johnson & Johnson alliance, the search giant has at its disposal its very own five-person Google X Life Sciences Team headed by Andrew Conrad.

In 2005, while working for Dole, “Conrad hired experts from diverse fields such as physics, mathematics, zoology and molecular biology, putting them to work on powerful new medical devices like electron microscopes and gene synthesizers. They knew little about what their colleagues did, but Conrad hoped that together they might come up with new ways to treat diseases like cancer. He is taking a similar approach at Google X.”

And if Conrad and his team need a little more robotics firepower to bring to the mix, there’s always the eight top-shelf robotics companies it bought in December of 2013, together with the brainpower and IP that came with those acquisitions.

See review of all eight: Inside Google?s Latest Series of Acquisitions.

Ethicon

Ethicon is the part of the Johnson & Johnson corporate family (since 1949) with whom Google?s Life Sciences Team will work to try to establish the new-age operating room.

Ethicon, with an 80-year history in surgery, has a veritable lock on the suture and surgical needle market in the U.S. It has expanded over the years to now include surgical devices such as its Harmonic wound shears.

In short, Ethicon?s comfort zone for its suture, needles and devices has always been at the patient?s side in the hands of a surgeon leaning into his/her work.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “Google reckons it can use its machine-vision and image-analysis software to help surgeons see better as they operate or make it easier for them to get information that?s relevant to the surgery.

“The focus is on so-called minimally-invasive surgery, which uses tools and other technology to reduce scarring, blood loss, pain and speed recovery times. Surgeons are increasingly using robotics and special cameras to control some of these tools and guide them to the right areas inside the body.

“The partnership is with Ethicon…will initially focus on procedures performed through open surgery, including complicated gynecological procedures, thoracic and colorectal surgeries, J&J said.

Google’s gambit

“Google?s move into healthcare is…part of a broader expansion into sectors such as transportation, robotics and communications that it hopes will produce large new businesses in coming decades.

“The surgical robotics effort aims to integrate Google?s expertise in computer science, advanced imaging and sensors into tools that surgeons use to operate.

“Real-time image analysis could help surgeons see better and software could highlight blood vessels, nerves or the edges of tumors that are difficult to see with the naked eye, Google said.

Google and Ethicon also hope to better organize the information surgeons need when they operate. Surgeons typically consult multiple separate screens in the operating room to check preoperative medical images, like MRIs, results of previous surgeries and lab tests, or understand how to navigate an unusual anatomical structure.”

Making an impact on healthcare and making new businesses in the process is certainly a sought after goal on the part of both Google and Johnson & Johnson, but Google’s overarching goal seems genuine enough, as Conrad put it in a statement: ?We hope to someday improve the experience of both surgeons and patients in the operating room.?