My head hurts. My eyes hurt. I feel I can hardly form a coherent thought.
And I like it. That's right, I am absolutely mentally exhausted, but it is a rewarding feeling. I have been working really hard on building a cost model for a relatively new type of surgery. It isn't done often because the new technology that it relies on carries the stigma of being very expensive. And it is expensive, to the tune of 1.2 million dollars for the unit. But it also carries with it the potential (and now being realized promise) of allowing for minimally invasive surgery.
It is allowing patients to go home in 1/3 of the time traditionally thought to be safe. It is leading to an almost 80% reduction in the need for transfusions. Plus, it is just cool. It is like operating while playing a video game. How could I not love that?
But because of the overhead of the equipment, few centers are picking it up, and even fewer private physicians can see it as a viable alternative. But we may have just changed that. Obviously, I am not going to go into too many details (this isn't published work yet), but I spent the entire day building a rather complex cost model, including multiple types of sensitivity analysis, that demonstrate that, if patients do go home in 1/3 the time, and you do enough of these types of surgeries a month, it can actually be done at a reduced cost than the traditional counterpart. This goes against the mindset of doctors across the nation. Others have built cost models before, but they all left out the cost of the equipment. But we were able to show very clearly today that, even including the cost of the technology, you can do this surgery at no more cost.
This could be big news. No, this is big news. We send the abstract off on Friday.