The growth of robotic operations has exploded in recent years, but a host of nonmedical factors, namely marketing by hospitals and the robot maker itself along with the desire of surgeons to embrace technology, seem to be playing an outsized role in patients’ decisions to have robotic surgery. This cover story, in a monthly trade magazine for executives at commercial and government health insurance plans, explored the economics of robotic surgery in the context of recent medical evidence of two popular robotic operations: radical prostatectomy and hysterectomy. The take-home point was that, besides questionable economics for hospitals, the medical rationale for robotic prostatectomy far surpasses that for hysterectomy.
