Exploring the social-technological gap in telesurgery

Abstract

While its technical feasibility has been illustrated over a decade ago, today, robot-assisted telesurgery is not a part of everyday surgical practice. The thresholds for adoption of telesurgery are mostly seen as technical, legal and financial challenges. However, the aim of this paper is to understand collaboration within distributed OR teams, which seems to be under examined in research on telesurgery. By means of a proxy-technology assessment and a series of interviews, collaborative challenges for telesurgery have been identified. These include the unfamiliarity of the remote surgeon with the practices of the local operating room team and the patient. In addition, verbal and non-verbal communication have to be mediated in a telesurgery setting, making it difficult for the remote surgeon to have an overview and stay in control during surgery. With this research, we illustrate how trust issues in distributed teams manifest in OR teams in a telesurgery setting.