Robotic Surgery Program Thriving at NGHS Due to Close Partnership Between Clinicians & IT, Says CIO Chris Paravate; Medical Director for Perioperative Services Dr. Ron Lewis; & Robotic Surgeon Dr. Chad Copper

In this healthsystemsCIO interview, Anthony Guerra engages with Chris Paravate, CIO of Northeast Georgia Health System, Dr. Ron Lewis, Medical Director for Perioperative Services, and Dr. Chad Copper, a robotic surgeon, to explore the collaborative relationship between IT and clinical teams in the context of robotic surgery. Emphasizing the importance of integrating IT from the outset of such projects, they reflect on how technology is increasingly embedded in clinical practice. The conversation underscores the necessity of communication and teamwork between clinicians and IT to successfully implement advanced technologies.

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Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemsCIO’s Interview with Northeast Georgia Health System CIO Chris Paravate, Medical Director for Perioperative Services Dr. Ron Lewis and Robotic Surgeon, Dr. Chad Copper. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me.

Chris: Thank you for having us.

Dr. Lewis: Thank you for having us.

Anthony: Great. The reason we are here today is because Chris, I saw your post echoing Dr. Copper’s post about robotic surgery. Excited to talk a little bit about that and how clinicians and IT can work together on this type of project. But first, Chris, if you want to start out by telling us a little bit about your organization and your role.

Chris: I’m Chris Paravate. I’m the CIO at Northeast Georgia Health System. We have five hospitals, a number of ambulatory locations, probably well over 100, and we partner very closely with a lot of the physician groups including Dr. Copper’s group, the Longstreet Clinic.

Anthony: Excellent. Gentlemen, I think your titles are sufficient to describe what you do. Chris, in the post you commented “we do a lot of robotic surgery” and that was echoing Dr. Copper’s post which said “so proud of our robotic team at Northeast Georgia Medical Center, 25,000 patients helped and healed with da Vinci Robotic Surgery. Very blessed to be part of this team.” That caught my eye. Obviously, you have a clinician, a surgeon and the CIO saying “hey, this is working out really well.” Very cool stuff.

I’m really interested in the genesis of these type of things. What I mean by that is clinicians, surgeons, are I’m sure reading medical journals, staying up on the latest technology. Technology is more and more permeating the actual practice of clinical care, not just the tracking of clinical care as in the EMR.

I just did an interview about surgeons using Apple Vision Pro, cutting edge. We’re really seeing technology deeper and deeper into the actual practice of medicine. I’m interested in how this kind of request even surfaces. When and how is IT brought into the process? I want to bring stories of that collaboration to light.

Chris: Dr. Lewis, maybe you could start a little bit about the genesis of the robotic program and then we can pass it off to Dr. Copper.

Dr. Lewis: We started our robotic program all the way back in 2008 with an anonymous donation of a robot. The interesting part about that fact is it was donated so that we could do cardiac surgery and we did not do our first cardiac robotic surgery until 2023. The program has been building that whole time, really starting in 2015 as we began to add hospitals, we also began to add robotics and I think that we just continued to grow sort of exponentially at times with our robotics program.

We now have a total of 9 systems from that one initial system, we’re in two locations and with the addition of th...