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Dr. Stefano Bini is a leading orthopedic surgeon and researcher at UC San Francisco who is passionate about advancing the orthopedic field with technology including AI and robotics. He is also the founder of the Digital Orthopaedics Conference San Francisco (DOCSF), a forum to foster connections between stakeholders to promote healthcare technology innovation. In this episode, he discusses recommendations for improving the adoption of groundbreaking new technology in healthcare:
“Residents, doctors, they need to be exposed to [new and innovative] technology…if you’ve seen digital solutions and you’ve seen them work, when you’re dealing with your own problems, you might say ‘Wait a minute. Is there another way to do things?'”
– Dr. Stefano Bini
Dr. Bini discussed his career and observation of silos between clinicians and researchers and the technologists that could be able to help with innovative solutions. “I continued to get more involved in digital health, and I’m going to orthopedic conferences [realizing]…these two sets of people [research-minded clinicians and technologists] are not talking to each other. There’s no place where the CEO of a startup could go and meet a bunch of forward-looking orthopedic surgeons, and throw some health care administrators and venture capitalists into the mix and have a conversation,” Dr. Bini said.
He pointed out: ”If super smart people don’t know that these technologies exist because they’re just not exposed to them in their daily life, or they don’t think of them as being accessible, then they’re not gonna start dreaming, asking the question, pushing the boundaries, making investments. I see my role as exposing people that need to know [about new] technology to the technologists themselves.”
To address this challenge, he founded the Digital Orthopaedics Conference San Francisco (DOCSF), a forum to foster connections between stakeholders to promote healthcare technology innovation. He said: “It’s a perfect place to innovate…by placing these startups in front of of an ecosystem, not just a subset of venture capitalists or perhaps a couple of hospital administrators – with everybody there, you have presentations, but afterwards, conversations…it’s what happens at the breaks [in conference programming that creates the magic, creates the glue, creates the connections, the network effect that occurs when you bring in these different parts of health care.”
Dr. Bini recommends creating forums like DOCSF to foster more collaboration that can move the healthcare industry forward.
Dr. Bini gave an example of collaboration with technologists that has helped solve pain points:
“I was in joint replacement, and demand was growing through the roof as the older generation was coming through. We had limited access to physical therapy. But I came across a small company with a platform that allowed us to interface with patients using video clips. We leveraged it and demonstrated a 60% reduction in demand for inpatient care paths in a randomized controlled trial.”
“We all saw huge opportunities to take these nascent technologies and apply them to actual pain points.”
He gave another example of robotics innovations discussed at 2024’s DOCSF conference: “We wanted to get people thinking about what the possibilities are when we upgrade the robotic platforms that are currently being used in healthcare…there’s a lot of places where robots can be helpful, whether in the operating room, the client setting, and we’re seeing them run around delivering coffee in hospitals. Particularly in pharmacy, [robotics can be] super useful. But until you know what you don’t know, you can’t ask the question, ‘Bring this technology to my world. What would that look like?'”
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