Modern medicine: New technology allows precision

Medicine has definitely come a long way since the use of leeches and bleeding people to relieve them of disease and evil humors.

Today’s high-tech advancements in medical equipment have provided physicians with the capability of precision that makes even the 1990s seem archaic.

And Northern Colorado’s hospitals are spending millions to stay current.

Among the new wave of technology available in the region is the $1.2 million daVinci robotic surgery instrument, now in use at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins.

“Robotics are big for surgery,´ said Craig Luzinsky, chief nursing officer for PVH. “Poudre Valley Hospital has a robot for gynecology – we use it in hysterectomies. There’s a much shorter recovery time because it’s not as invasive. And then we use it in urology for prostate surgery because there is a much higher success rate and it lessens the chances for impotence. We’re also using it in cardio for (heart) bypass work.”

High-tech medical equipment applies to three basic areas of medicine: diagnostics, treatment and patient safety.

Robotics comes under the “treatment” category, but it’s the diagnostic side that generates the most interest. If you bring up the subject of new machines, the first thing that gets brought up – most of the time, anyway – are machines that allow doctors to better see suspicious signs. One of those machines performs Positron Emission Tomography, known colloquially as a PET scan.

A CT (computed tomography) scan will pick up a lesion in the part of the body that’s being checked. However, it’s not exact. Just because a CT scan finds a lesion, doesn’t mean it’s found a tumor. It could just be scar tissue. A PET scan is much more precise.

“A PET scan can show the level of a tumor,´ said Julianne Fritz, regional director of oncology services at McKee Medical Center in Loveland. “It can be used for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease and some heart diseases. Combined with the CT scan, it’s tremendously valuable.”

Dan Dennie is the director of medical imaging at North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley. NCMC just opened a women’s breast health center in April, which is full of new imaging equipment designed to give doctors a better and more precise picture of tumors.

There is a bilateral coil that, once attached to a machine, enables magnetic resonance imaging instruments to pinpoint the location and the size of a tumor. “Historically, people had to go to Denver to get this done,” Dennie said. Not only that, the contrast medium that was used could only be taken over a certain time period, so people had to make two trips.

If something was found, that just meant that something was there. Doctors weren’t really sure what it was until they did a biopsy. There is also a new machine for guided biopsies through magnetic resonance imaging, a fancy way of saying that they are more precise and more accurate.

If something is found, what can be done?

On the treatment side, Fritz is high on the hospital’s Linear Accelerator with Multi-Leaf Collimators. It sounds fearsome; and if you are a tumor, it is. What this instrument does, according to Fritz, is apply higher doses of radiation directly at the tumor.

NCMC can use something called RF (radio-frequency) Ablation in certain tumor, Dennie said. RF Ablation involves insertion of a probe into the tumor; the tumor is burned away so that it doesn’t even require surgery.

For the patient safety category, the greatest concern is getting the most up-to-date and recent information as soon as possible. For example, at PVH, the hospital just instituted an electronic health records program at the end of February. “We have been working on this for a year,´ said Luzinski, who also said the hospital has spent about $3 million on the system. Electronic records serve to flag certain medications to which a patient may be allergic.

In conjuction with this records system, Luzinski also said that PVH is going to put in a Bedside Verification Information system by the end of this year. The system will barcode everything – the medication, the patient, the nurse. This will make it easier to match up certain drugs with a patient and it will also determine who gave a certain medication to someone and when. “It will drastically cut down on errors,” Luzinski said. “In the places where it’s been instituted, it cuts down on errors by as much as 70 percent.”

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