ShawneeDispatch.com

A new addition to the staff at Shawnee Mission Medical Center makes R2D2 seem surprisingly less far-fetched.

Surgeon Joseph Petelin made the comparison while sitting in his office Tuesday morning. At the same time, he was maneuvering through a boardroom across the street at the hospital, speaking to, seeing and being seen by a crowd gathered there to meet REMi, Shawnee Mission's robot doctor.

A robot doctor was introduced Monday as new technology that will visit with in-hospital patients at Shawnee Mission Medical Center.

The hospital is one of only 10 in the nation and the first in the Midwest to introduce a robot to help with patient visits. The hospital began using the robot, operated and personified remotely by patients' actual doctors, at the first of the year and introduced it to the public this week.

Hospital staff say the robot makes things easier, more efficient and even more fun.

"The robot provides physicians with an opportunity to increase physician-to-patient communication, which is crucial for consistently delivering high quality care," Petelin said. "REMi offers both physicians and patients increased access to each other beyond traditional in-room visits."

The 5-foot-4-inch robot looks a little like an oversized vacuum cleaner with a flat-screen computer monitor for a head.

Dressed in a personalized lab coat -- "REMi" is embroidered near the right lapel -- with Petelin's head and shoulders displayed on its monitor, the robot whirred as it rolled through the conference-room crowd looking this way and that, eventually turning around and talking to onlookers.

Audio equipment allows patients and doctors to converse, and a video camera atop the screen serves as REMi's eyes.

A camera and microphone on top of a monitor allows cardiologist Paul Kramer (lower left) to visit with his patient John McIntyre via the robot doctor.

Through the camera, a doctor can see a patient smile, frown or gesture. The doctor can also zoom in to take a closer look at a wound or the patient's bedside vitals computer.

No matter how far away they are, doctors can drive the robot using a joystick at their control panels. The pivoting camera enables the doctor to see where he or she is headed, looking sideways to go around corners or straight down to navigate over a tricky carpet seam.

Shawnee Mission president and CEO Samuel H. Turner Sr. said REMi would not replace physical examinations -- the robot has no arms. Its purpose is to be a point of contact when only consultation is needed.

"We don't use it as a primary tool," Turner said.

When doctors can't be bedside, or don't need to be, they can visit patients in the middle of the night without leaving home, or quickly check in from across the hospital, saving walking time from an office to the patient.

Petelin, who currently has control units at his home and his hospital office, is expecting a laptop hookup in a couple of weeks. That would enable him to visit patients from anywhere in the world with a high-speed internet hookup, he said.

Pulmonologist Michael Nelson said he typically did patient rounds in the intensive care unit around 9 or 10 at night. With REMi, he can roam through the unit and visit each patient without leaving home unless someone needed him to.

"My initial feeling when I went to people was that they would be very put off by it," Nelson said. "Everybody, at least to date, has been uniformly positive."

Doctors can also use the computer monitor to show a patient X-rays, diagrams or photos of a wound.

John McIntyre, who was resting Tuesday after undergoing angioplasty the day before, said a visit from the robot was a novelty, easy to communicate with and actually kind of fun.

From a seat in the conference room, McIntyre's cardiologist, Paul Kramer, saw nurses and doctors smile and wave as he navigated REMi upstairs through the halls to room 404 in the hospital's telemetry unit, where his patient was sitting up in bed awaiting instructions and possibly a discharge.

"How are you feeling today?" Kramer asked. "Any problems at the catheter site?"

McIntyre reported having a restless night but feeling much better than before the procedure.

"My only question is 'When can I go home?'" he said.

While it's not a perfect substitute for an in-person doctor, a visit by REMi is a leap forward from a phone call or a fill-in.

"It'd be better yet to hear a person, but this technology is unbelievable," McIntyre said. "There's no comparison with a phone call."

Turner said The Foundation for Shawnee Mission Medical Center purchased the equipment for the hospital at a cost of $25,000 for the robot and an extra $5,000 for each control panel.

The hospital has one robot and five remote control panels, but Turner said there would be more on the way.

"This has sort of taken the hospital by storm," he said. "So we're going to have to replicate that over the next year."

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