SOUTH KINGSTOWN – At South County Hospital, Rhode Island’s only independent hospital, Dr. Bob Marchand performs full knee replacement surgeries using a high-tech tool that will not be commercially marketed and released until March 2017, he told Providence Business News.
That tool, the Mako robotic arm-assisted technology, earned approval from the Food and Drug Administration in August 2015, said Marchand, an orthopedic surgeon at South County Hospital and a paid consultant for Stryker, a company that bought Mako in 2014. Earlier, he was a paid consultant for Mako, where he helped with technology development and taught other surgeons how to perform partial knee and hip replacements using Mako equipment.
