How award-winning Canadian technology can help overloaded hospitals

By Ananth Ravi

The ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to overwhelm Canada’s healthcare system. The surgical backlog that has built up in our hospitals since 2020 continues to come at a cost for patients and their families. In Ontario alone, hospitals this past spring were facing a backlog of one million surgeries and the province’s doctors are now pushing for innovative and efficient solutions, such as non-profit surgical centres in the face of this challenge.

We’ve always known that delays in care can have life-or-death consequences for patients – particularly for people living with cancer. The Canadian Cancer Society has noted that delaying cancer care by just a few weeks can increase the risk of death by around 10 percent. Leaving COVID aside – even other respiratory challenges such as RSV and the seasonal flu can push wait times over the top in an already-strained system.

One way to help solve the backlog for Canada’s overloaded hospitals is to adopt newer and better technology that can help make surgeries more efficient while improving the patient experience.

For example, many hospitals still use wire-guided localization, a way to mark the location of a lesion before surgery, by inserting wires into the patient’s breast. It’s a technique that hasn’t changed much in 50 years. Wire-guided localization demands a lot of coordination among the patient, radiologist, surgeon and pathologist because the procedure has to be performed on the same day as the surgery. This can create scheduling challenges for all the people involved as well as for the hospital itself.

Wire-guided localization is particularly challenging and anxiety-inducing for patients. Because the lesion has to be marked on the same day as the surgery, it can mean a long day spent waiting at the hospital. As part of the wire-guided procedure, the patient needs to fast the whole time, which can sometimes lead to fainting. Patients often need to sit around in a hospital gown as they wait for an operating room to open up, while also trying to avoid accidentally snagging their gown on the protruding wire. Finally, the wire has also been known to become displaced or transected during surgery, which can lead to inaccuracy and additional procedures.

Instead of relying on this method, hospitals should consider a technology where the marker can be implanted without wires on the same day or a few days before surgery as a way to ease backlogs in a way that is much more patient-centred and efficient.

One such technology is MOLLI Surgical’s Health Canada-approved MOLLI®, a precise, easy to use new technology for soft tissue localization. Recognized with a gold medal in the 2022 Medical Design Excellence Awards, named as one of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2022 and one of the Next Big Things in Tech by Fast Company, MOLLI puts the patient first by providing a better experience over traditional wire and other localization options. The wire-free technology includes the MOLLI Marker®, which is detected using the MOLLI Wand®. The MOLLI Tablet® then displays the distance between the tip of the MOLLI Wand and the MOLLI Marker, helping surgeons locate lesions (and precisely remove) them more efficiently with improved accuracy. The localization procedure takes about five minutes. This gives patients autonomy over their scheduling and creates flexibility for health systems to adapt quickly to changing needs.

From a hospital perspective, wire-free technology allows for a more flexible approach when it comes to scheduling surgeries, reduces the impact of unforeseen delays in radiology, and increases the number of surgeries that can be performed in a day. Just by “decoupling” localization from surgery, care teams can improve their workflows to make care for patients more timely and create a better overall experience. When hospitals take this step, it leads to a 34 per cent increase in the scheduling capacity of radiology departments and a 41 per cent increase in breast-conserving surgery programs. In short, wire-free localization provides a better experience before, during, and after surgery for patients, for the radiologist who helps to locate the lesion, and for the surgeon who has to remove it.

For people who work in hospitals, improving their workflows, clearing cancer surgery backlogs and making sure people can continue to have faith in their local hospital are all vital concerns. As hospitals and administrators explore new ways to increase efficiency in the face of these wait-time challenges, it’s important that the changes that are ultimately adopted are not just efficient for the hospitals, but centred on the patient, too.

Ananth Ravi is President & CEO of MOLLI Surgical.