Three centres, five surgeons, a little over four months.
On April 20, a child with neuromuscular scoliosis at Scottish Rite for Children in Dallas became the first. Amy McIntosh performed the procedure, three months after the FDA cleared the system in January. Meanwhile she has performed more procedures using SDS in her patients.
By August the system had reached two hospitals in Los Angeles. First in Cedars-Sinai, where Ken Illingworth treated a child with few options left on the table. The child was doing great after surgery and standing better than he ever had.
Later that week in the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) Lindsay Andras, Tyler Tetreault and Michael Heffernan used the SDS successfully in their patients. “Pleased with how intuitive it was to use the system”, was also feedback we got afterwards.
Slowly introducing the system to specialized surgeons in specialized hospitals. That strategy and pace is deliberate. A growth-friendly implant does not arrive at a hospital the way a shipment does. Each case is extensively discussed peer-to-peer. Each centre runs its own review and its own training, then plans a first case that has to go well before a second one is planned. It is the pace that aims for clinical success, not expanding market access.
Eight is a small number. For each of these children the follow-up started the day after surgery, the same way it did for the first child in Utrecht in 2015. That is where the work sits now.