US 2,019,206,564 · Filed 2018-12-04

How Operating Rooms Turn Surgery Data Into Smarter Hospitals

Imagine if every surgical tool in an operating room could talk to a central computer and report what it did during each operation. This patent describes a system that collects all that data—how long surgery took, which instruments were used, what went smoothly—and automatically organizes it to spot patterns that help hospitals improve safety and efficiency.

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The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a computer system that gathers real-time information from multiple surgical devices during operations, figures out what type of procedure was performed based on that data, groups the information by procedure type, and then analyzes it to find trends. What's protected here is the specific method of automatically connecting surgical device data, categorizing it by procedure, and extracting insights—not just storing raw numbers, but the intelligent organization and pattern-finding piece.

Why it matters

Hospitals generate enormous amounts of surgical data every day, but most of it gets buried in reports nobody reads systematically. This patent lets hospitals automatically harvest insights from that data without manual sorting. It could help identify which procedures are running longer than they should, which instrument combinations work best, or where safety issues are emerging—the kind of business intelligence that improves outcomes and reduces costs without requiring staff to manually dig through records.

Real-world use

Every time a surgical team finishes an operation, their instruments and monitors have logged dozens of data points—incision time, instrument usage, complications. This system automatically captures and organizes all of it so a hospital administrator can later see that knee replacements in Operating Room 2 are consistently taking 15 minutes longer than in Room 3.

Original USPTO abstract

A computer-implemented method for collecting data within a facility is disclosed. The method includes receiving, by a computer system, perioperative data from a plurality of surgical devices located within the facility, the perioperative data associated with a plurality of surgical procedures performed in the facility; determining, by the computer system, procedural context data associated with the plurality of surgical procedures based at least in part on the perioperative data; aggregating, by the computer system, the perioperative data according to the procedural context data; and determining, by the computer system, trends associated with the surgical procedures performed in the facility according to the perioperative data and the procedural context data.

Patent details

Publication number: US 2,019,206,564
Filing date: 2018-12-04
Grant date: Application — not yet granted
Assignee: Ethicon Llc
Inventor(s): SHELTON, IV, FREDERICK E., HARRIS, JASON L., ARONHALT, TAYLOR W., BAXTER, III, CHESTER O., ZEINER, MARK S.
CPC class: G16H40/63

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