Proximie is radically transforming the landscape of surgical mentorship and collaboration. By introducing new ways to objectively view, record and collaborate on procedures across healthcare systems, our market-leading digital platform is paving the way for achieving and maintaining surgical excellence through widely accessible, scalable training alongside continual improvement of performance.
Built from the ground up - by surgeons, for surgeons - Proximie is the ultimate collaborative reviewing tool, making it possible for teachers and trainees to meticulously observe, review and share techniques, insights and learnings in real-time - not just during surgery itself, but long after surgeons have left the OR.
For centuries, surgeons have been told that they need to be physically present in the OR to help their patients and that proximity to the patient and healthcare team was paramount. This is fundamentally changing now. The old teaching surgical model of ‘See One, Do one, Teach One’ is evolving as Proximie redefines the dynamics between mentor and mentee, the means by which procedures can be performed and viewed, and the scale on which surgical expertise can be shared.
"Proximie redefines the dynamics between mentor and mentee, the means by which procedures can be performed and viewed, and the scale on which surgical expertise can be shared."
A new paradigm for perfection
It is increasingly routine for some of the world's best surgeons to record every procedure they perform on Proximie. More than 95% of all surgeries taking place on our platform are now recorded and Proximie currently hosts over 80,000 individual video views of surgery, making it the largest database of its kind in the world. Emerging from this archive is a unique tapestry of technique, insight, workflow, team interaction and operative detail.
This ever-growing repository of objective ambient data from the OR is now forming the basis for the continual development and a surgical culture that is transitioning from ‘See One, Do One, Teach One’ to Proximie’s vision of ‘Prepare, Perform, Perfect’ - where a wealth of video footage provides additional training hours to hone the skills of a more adept and proficient surgical workforce.
'See one, Do one, Teach one’ has always been dependent on the three Cs: co-presence, communication and collaboration,” says Dr. Nadine Hachach-Haram, CEO and founder of Proximie. “There are some iconic paintings of old surgical theatres that show 30 people crowded around a procedure, each trying to capture a glimpse of the patient and the surgeon’s technique. But that historical record is exactly how I trained; it’s how all surgeons have trained - until now. With Proximie, we have evolved that scenario into something far more accessible and scalable: an immersive experience that goes far beyond the boundaries of the four walls of an operating room.
“We coined the phrase ‘Prepare, Perform, Perfect’ to move away from the traditional teaching model, and to highlight Proximie’s capacity to enable surgeons to review and analyse their own work. This creates limitless potential for identifying areas of self-improvement and refining surgical technique; a digitised continuum of learning that can ultimately deliver improved patient safety and outcomes.”
“...This creates limitless potential for identifying areas of self-improvement and refining surgical technique.”
An unmatched, reviewable record of any procedure
No competitor can match Proximie’s ability to record four different viewpoints simultaneously, providing an HD, low-latency, 360-degree view of every angle of the OR that constitutes a comprehensive understanding of any surgical procedure. This makes the recording of surgery immensely valuable for both personal review of surgical technique as well as oversight of collaboration within the OR team.
“Perfecting a procedure would historically involve an in-person discussion between mentor and surgical trainee deliberating subjectively over the whole surgical procedure and process - after the facts and out of the room,” says Nadine. “With Proximie, you can now dive back into any given procedure and watch what you did in high definition. You can do a collaborative review of what really happened, rather than what might have happened. Furthermore, you can sit with your mentor on a case - in person or in entirely different locations altogether - and draw or annotate over the video, pull through patient information like X-rays, or even compare the technique in question to someone else’s from the Proximie archive.
“That entire continuum is invaluable and it aligns with our continuum of communication. No one in surgery stops training when they finish their residency. You're constantly training and adopting new skills, new techniques, and new devices that are coming to market. So it's an ongoing process, and the more we can create a continuum through digitisation, the more scalable it is.”
“No competitor can match Proximie’s ability to record four different viewpoints simultaneously, providing an HD, low-latency, 360-degree view of every angle of the OR…”
Prepare, Perform, Perfect in practice
The power of cloud computing means that Proximie goes beyond simply archiving, but makes possible wide and easy access to recorded procedures. Surgeons can seamlessly share recordings of new, more effective techniques with colleagues and trainees, either within their own institutions or to a global network of medical professionals. This is key to the democratisation of surgical knowledge - and the revolution is already in motion.
“I use Proximie to record every procedure I perform,” says Mr. Andrea Bille, a Consultant Thoracic Surgeon at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. “Proximie allows me to go back and review the procedure and refine my techniques. It’s an excellent system for recording and remotely viewing these procedures, and we have found it to be an indispensable training tool. Proximie has made it possible to create a highly detailed archive divided according to histology, where someone can go in and specifically search for a right upper lobectomy for a stage one cancer, or a right upper lobectomy for a stage three cancer, for example.”
The fact that Proximie is hardware agnostic means it also integrates seamlessly with other medical devices in the OR, ensuring its benefits can be deployed in the widest variety of clinical settings, with new or existing devices. Dr James Porter is the Medical Director for Robotic Surgery at the Swedish Medical Centre in Seattle, and envisages a future in which remote assistance greatly maximises the quality and availability of robotic surgery: “This is what is exciting about robotics working hand-in-hand with remote assistance; the hugely increased ease of access to expertise, guidance and proctoring that has tremendous potential to promote best practice and better equip us to capitalise on that one chance for a perfect outcome.”
Sean Tutton, MD, FSIR, FCIRSE from UC San Diego Health recently used Proximie to deliver a post-operative review, providing technical information about a Tumour Ablation on the left shoulder.
He says: "I think what is cool about this technology and these videos, is that rather than try and pull off a live case (peer-to-peer review) which can difficult to pull off, if you can do something like this and make it 10-15 minutes, and then have moderation over it, and have audience participation while the case is going on, that becomes a very efficient way to deliver information."
Proximie is also being met with eager approval from trainee surgeons. The findings of a study titled Proximie in the operating theatre: evaluation of a virtual operating platform for medical student education - published in The Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England - found that 98% of students who had used Proximie felt strongly that they would be likely to attend future sessions taking place on the platform, while 96% felt that it was a useful tool for surgical education. Perhaps even more astonishingly, more than half of students who had used Proximie reported finding it preferable to attending the operating theatre in person, or using other virtual operating platforms.
The pursuit of universal best practice
Planning, preparation and the sharing of expertise are vital elements of a healthcare system delivering high quality surgical care - and these are precisely the factors that Proximie has focused on making it easier to achieve and scale. Enabling effective collaboration between practitioners anywhere in the world is the key to democratising healthcare, shortening delivery cycles and ensuring that geographical location poses no obstacle to delivering complex procedures and the highest possible standard of care.
In creating a shift from the old paradigm of “See One, Do One, Teach One” - a process encumbered by subjectivity and limited opportunities for observation - towards the new paradigm of “Prepare, Perform, Perfect”, Proximie is driving the adoption of digital methods of training, mentoring and continual learning that are anchored in objective video archives of best practice and collaborative surgical expertise. This is collaboration in a way that has never before been possible, with the potential to make healthcare inequity a thing of the past.
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