Robotic surgery: the area's first da Vinci program, 2007

2007 — today

The robot comes to Memorial: The hospitals' clearest adoption first is stated in the system's own formulation, and it is printed as the system's: Beacon Health System's locations record says the system "pioneered the area's first da Vinci Surgery program, which began at Memorial Hospital in 2007" — the robot-assisted, minimally invasive surgical platform through which Memorial's surgeons took up prostate, gynecologic, colorectal and general surgery in the technique's first American decade. The program's present place in the hospital is documented in the hospital's own federal return, which lists da Vinci robotic surgery among the surgical services of a department that in 2024 performed 7,952 inpatient procedures and 458 open-heart procedures — the cardiac figure carried here as the measure of the open-heart program's present scale, no first date for that program having been found in the record reached, as the note to this section states. Memorial's surgical plant has since added hybrid operating suites, in the system's account rooms in which specialists of different disciplines work the same case together. Robotic surgery is an adoption, not an invention — the da Vinci system is Intuitive Surgical's — and the entry claims for South Bend exactly what the record supports: that when the technique was new, this city's hospital was the area's first to build a program on it, and kept it.

Sources:

1. Beacon Health System, locations record for Memorial Hospital and Memorial Hospital Surgical Services (current, November 2026) — "Beacon Health System pioneered the area's first da Vinci Surgery program, which began at Memorial Hospital in 2007"; the hybrid operating suites.
2. Memorial Hospital of South Bend, Form 990 for the year ended December 2024, program-service account of Surgical Services — da Vinci robotic surgery among the services; 7,952 inpatient procedures and 458 open-heart procedures in 2024, the return's figures.