Surgical Safety Technologies joins Wellcome Leap's SAVE Program to Shorten MD Surgeon Training Time, Certify non-MD Practitioners Worldwide

Leading surgical Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform joins consortium working to reduce resource gap around the world, decrease preventable complications.

NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES, April 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Surgical Safety Technologies, a pioneer in AI-enhanced surgical quality and safety improvement, today announced their participation in Wellcome Leap's SAVE (Surgery: Assess / Validate / Expand) program. As a SAVE performer, Surgical Safety Technologies will provide its OR Black Box^® Platform to researchers and academics working to create and deploy new models for minimally invasive abdominal surgery skills acquisition and objective assessment, and produce new patient recovery and deterioration detection systems. The team of performers will measure the impact of this program on surgical procedure access and outcomes around the world.

The SAVE program aims to develop new technologies combining AI, visualization and simulation to accomplish three major goals: 1. Demonstrate the capability to train non-MD practitioners to deliver routine laparoscopic abdominal surgery with equivalent outcomes to MD surgeons, 2. Shorten the timeline needed to train MD surgeons - by a full year - by accelerating skills acquisition and enabling objective quantification of competence, and 3. Reduce postoperative complications and mortality by >50% through advanced sensing, monitoring and pattern recognition strategies, thus increasing the confidence of surgeons, hospitals, patients and families. Surgical Safety Technologies' platform will enable SAVE performers to upload de-identified surgical videos, annotate key steps and events and overlay AI-generated analysis to identify potential risk factors.

"We have a moral imperative to leverage technologies like AI and immersive simulation to better prepare surgeons, democratizing access to high quality, safe and effective care," said Teodor Grantcharov, MD, Founder of Surgical Safety Technologies. "Working with Wellcome Leap's SAVE program allows us to push boundaries and ensure that each new surgeon possesses the necessary skills, experience and confidence to operate on patients. With our platform powering SAVE's simulation workstreams, learners can recreate procedures in virtual reality and identify risk factors, ultimately producing surgeons ready to deliver optimal, accessible care that saves lives—whether in developed countries or underserved regions around the world."

The Wellcome Leap SAVE program officially launched on January 6, 2023. In addition to providing the core platform, Surgical Safety Technologies will collaborate with other SAVE Performers over the next two years on research, development and deployment initiatives.

"A vast global surgery access gap causes millions of preventable deaths and disabilities each year in under-served regions," said Tom Weiser, MD, SAVE Program Director at Wellcome Leap. "Lack of trained surgical providers is a major driving factor behind this crisis. While surgeons spend years in residency observing procedures and honing skills, conventional training methods lack the objective skills assessment and cutting-edge simulation enabled by tools like Surgical Safety Technologies' OR Black Box Platform. This effort contributes to the overall goal of the SAVE program to revolutionize surgical training and rapidly scale the workforce of providers capable of delivering safe, life-saving surgical care worldwide. Reducing preventable surgical errors is also a critical benefit as we strive to make access to safe, high-quality surgical treatment the norm, not the exception, for every patient."

The integration of Surgical Safety Technologies' platform into surgical training has demonstrated its immense potential to enhance patient safety and democratize access to high-quality care. By providing an objective assessment of surgical skills coupled with simulated, risk-free environments to identify and remediate errors, the technology allows surgical training programs to ensure their graduates meet a new standard of preparedness before ever entering the operating room. This data-driven approach to surgical readiness certification is projected to dramatically reduce preventable surgical complications and "never events." With this partnership, Wellcome Leap's SAVE program aims to validate these impacts at scale and pave the way for widespread adoption of optimized surgical training and credentialing augmented by AI.

About Surgical Safety Technologies

Surgical Safety Technologies Inc. is a mission-driven organization that utilizes disruptive technologies to make healthcare safer globally. Its OR Black Box^® Platform is equipped with advanced sensors, AI-driven analytics, and a suite of software products to measure and optimize efficiency, safety and compliance to standard operating procedures. The unrivalled insights help eliminate overtime, prevent never events, optimize postoperative recovery and improve safety culture. High-quality evidence has demonstrated its effectiveness in reducing costs and improving patient outcomes across the leading healthcare centers in North America and Europe. More information can be found at www.surgicalsafety.com.

About Wellcome Leap

Wellcome Leap accelerates discovery and innovation for the benefit of human health. It builds bold, unconventional programs and funds them at scale, with the goal of achieving breakthrough scientific and technological solutions within five to ten years. With funding of more than half a billion US dollars from the Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Leap has launched ten programs since 2020. Its global Health Breakthrough Network spans more than 1 million scientists and engineers from over 150 organizations across six continents. Operating at the intersection of life sciences and engineering, Leap programs require best-in-class, multi-disciplinary, multinational teams assembled from universities, companies, and nonprofits working together to solve problems that they cannot solve alone. For more information on Wellcome Leap, please visit www.wellcomeleap.org, or follow us on X and LinkedIn.

SOURCE Surgical Safety Technologies