US 2,019,206,562 · Filed 2018-12-04

The Patent That Turns Operating Rooms Into Data Gold Mines

Imagine if your surgical suite could learn from thousands of other operating rooms around the world, then tell you the best way to stock supplies and organize your team. This patent describes a system where surgical hubs send data to the cloud, which analyzes what worked best and sends recommendations back to improve outcomes.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a method where cloud computing systems collect usage data from multiple surgical hubs, analyze that data alongside surgical outcomes, identify patterns about what resource configurations work best, and then display those recommendations back on the surgical hubs' displays. What's protected here is specifically the communication flow, the correlation analysis between usage patterns and outcomes, and the automated recommendation system that results.

Why it matters

Operating rooms are expensive to run and surgical outcomes vary widely. A system that pools data across multiple hospitals to identify best practices could reduce waste, improve efficiency, and potentially improve patient outcomes. Ethicon, a major surgical equipment manufacturer, is essentially building intelligence into the hardware ecosystem itself—turning individual surgical suites into nodes in a learning network that benefits the entire system.

Real-world use

A surgeon in one hospital sees a dashboard recommendation to adjust how they prepare instruments based on what thousands of other surgeons learned works best; that recommendation comes from patterns the cloud found across the entire network.

Original USPTO abstract

A method of displaying an operational parameter of a surgical system is disclosed. The method includes receiving, by a cloud computing system of the surgical system, first usage data, from a first subset of surgical hubs of the surgical system; receiving, by the cloud computing system, second usage data, from a second subset of surgical hubs of the surgical system; analyzing, by the cloud computing system, the first and the second usage data to correlate the first and the second usage data with surgical outcome data; determining, by the cloud computing system, based on the correlation, a recommended medical resource usage configuration; and displaying, on respective displays on the first and the second subset of surgical hubs, indications of the recommended medical resource usage configuration.

Patent details

Publication number: US 2,019,206,562
Filing date: 2018-12-04
Grant date: Application — not yet granted
Assignee: Ethicon Llc
Inventor(s): SHELTON, IV, FREDERICK E., YATES, DAVID C., WIENER, EITAN T., ALDRIDGE, JEFFREY L., MESSERLY, JEFFREY D., HARRIS, JASON L., WIDENHOUSE, TAMARA
CPC class: H04L67/10

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