GREAT FALLS — There is just one hospital in central Montana that has the technology to perform a cutting-edge diagnostic lung treatment, and it is located here in Great Falls.
“I picked up the phone and called Doctor Sisk one day and said, 'Hey, let's go down to Arizona to a show site for navigational bronchoscopy, and let's watch people do it. Let's understand what this does differently than what we're doing now,'” stated Mark Robinson, CEO of Great Falls Hospital and Clinic.
Dr. Sisk talks about the new diagnostic tool - watch:
Bronchoscopy is a procedure that employs a flexible tube and a light to inspect the lungs and airways for infections, abnormalities, and cancerous lesions.
After visiting Tucson to watch doctors utilized the system, Robinson and pulmonologist Dr. Megan Sisk recognized a potential to improve care at home.
"With the previous cameras’ technology, you could only reach a certain airway size, and that was your limitation. You couldn't drive any further because the road was too narrow,” Robinson said.
If the lungs are a road, a bronchoscope is the vehicle that travels through them. The hospital's new ION Endoluminal System, a robotic platform developed by Intuitive, allows the “vehicle” to drive deeper into the most restricted and difficult-to-reach areas of the lung.
“We know that lung cancer has the highest mortality. And so, the only way for us to beat that or to stage cancers at stage 1 or 2, as opposed to 3 and 4, is to get to the furthest parts of the lung and diagnose those lung nodules that are hard to get to otherwise without the ION robot,” Robinson explained.
Lung nodules are tiny patches or growths in the lungs that may be benign or cancerous. Early diagnosis of malignant nodules is crucial, especially in smokers or those who have recently quit.
“We screen patients who are smokers or recent former smokers for lung cancer. So, like we do mammograms for breast cancer, we screen smokers with a type of CT scan that they get once a year. And on those CT scans, we often find nodules,” Sisk added.
In just six months, Great Falls Hospital and Clinic has outperformed every other ION program in Montana, performing more than 50 robotic bronchoscopies.
"That's ultimately the part that's so exciting about it is that that's 50 patients with, you know, potential benefit or impact," Sisk told reporters.
"Once we started diagnosing at stage one, you're giving people years of their life back, and that is you can't measure that," Robinson claimed.
