Dr. Bernasek Discusses Outpatient Surgery

I’m Dr. Thomas Bernasek and I’m one of the founding members of Florida Orthopaedic Institute. I do between six to seven hundred total joint replacements per year, totally in total hip replacement. Increasingly we are evolving to the outpatient setting and patients who are good candidates include those who are generally healthy, generally leaner patients, muscular, more active. Patients who are not good candidates or those who have medical comorbidities and what that means is that they have other medical conditions which makes them less safe to be done any non-hospital, non-monitored scenario. Outpatient joint replacement is in evolution at this time. It is estimated that within the next five years roughly 50 percent of the joint replacements we do will be as an outpatient.

So at this point, we are still I think in the beginning of this process and it is so significantly and very rapidly increasing in numbers. The most common procedures performed as an outpatient are hip replacement which is where we replaced both the ball and socket and also knee replacement of which there are two variations. There is a so-called partial replacement or unicompartmental knee replacement. That’s a circumstance where you only replace portion of the knee. And also total knee replacement which would replace the entire portion of the knee. The bottom line is that a lot of the treatment is very similar to what we’ve always done with joint replacement. It’s just very accelerated regarding recuperation. I think the biggest benefit of outpatient surgery is a patient’s ability to return to normal activity more quickly because not only can we do it in a fashion that makes them recover better but the cost is less overall to the healthcare system. And our intention is to provide not only the best patient care but to improve care for everyone by the research we introduced.