Evolving Beyond Craft Surgery Is Both Inevitable and Essential

Given the increasing emphasis in health care on improving outcomes, reproducible results, and creating value for the patient, orthopedic surgery in particular must necessarily continue to progress away from an individualized and a surgeon-specific technical craft and toward a highly automated and computer-integrated process in which surgeon and digitized systems interact to provide the most reproducible and consistent outcomes possible. In doing so, orthopedic surgery would follow the same path that every other highly reliable and safety conscious industry has adopted by absolute necessity. This evolution should therefore not be discouraged but rather embraced and accelerated.