Jul 15, 2026 · 38 min · 11 segments
**What if the future of surgical training doesn't happen in the operating room?** **In this episode of Med Tech Gurus, we sit down with Dr. Danny Goel, orthopedic surgeon, clinical professor at the…
Danny GoelGuestTom HickeyHostSo Danny, as mentioned, you're both a practicing orthopedic surgeon and now a CEO of a technology company, right? So I'm just kind of curious about, you know, not only the family, but other experiences in your own training or early career that made you start questioning whether the traditional surgical training model could keep up with today's realities.
And one of the things that was very clear was the amount of pressure that one faced starting a residency and that they had to learn all this knowledge in five years and then go out and execute and apply that skill on real patients where the risks were high.
Not only did they have to acquire all this knowledge, but they had to acquire all this technical skill.
And the technical skill comes in very... high risk high stake opportunities which is the operating room and so when when you multiply that problem times you know residency programs around the world it's no different in fact it might be worse in other places than say where i trained or better for example but we didn't know that and so you have this uh this quality of training that's variable these experiences that are variable both in the operating room and outside the operating room.
And yet everybody's supposed to be able to deliver equal care once they graduate.
And so going through this training myself, I realized that this is a really interesting problem because I experienced it firsthand.
Yeah, that's really fascinating, right? I've been in this business for about 40 years and I've been in the OR many, many, many times.
And it's trying to keep up with all that too, right? And then going even from one operating room to another, sometimes there's variables just within your own system, right? That's right.
And then with that, it seems like many residency programs are dealing with compressed training time, as you mentioned.
I mean, it has been five years, and sometimes I'm seeing it even more compressed than that.
So how are those structural pressures changing the way young surgeons develop competency today? The system has changed dramatically since I went through training
That always was the case even when I trained, but now it's become front and center, especially in the US where we have ambulatory surgical centers, which are outpatient surgical centers.
Because efficiency has become so important, which we know is excellent for patient outcomes, that focus on efficiency has led to decreasing opportunities for education.
The second is, several years ago, the amount of clinical hours a resident could spend in the hospital were significant than they are today.
And so the clinical hours that you have to learn this information has been reduced.
So the number of procedures today that are available in orthopedics is much higher than they were when I went through residency program.
So Danny, as mentioned, you're both a practicing orthopedic surgeon and now a CEO of a technology company, right? So I'm just kind of curious about, you know, not only the family, but other experiences in your own training or early career that made you start questioning whether the traditional surgical training model could keep up with today's realities.
And one of the things that was very clear was the amount of pressure that one faced starting a residency and that they had to learn all this knowledge in five years and then go out and execute and apply that skill on real patients where the risks were high.
Not only did they have to acquire all this knowledge, but they had to acquire all this technical skill.
And the technical skill comes in very... high risk high stake opportunities which is the operating room and so when when you multiply that problem times you know residency programs around the world it's no different in fact it might be worse in other places than say where i trained or better for example but we didn't know that and so you have this uh this quality of training that's variable these experiences that are variable both in the operating room and outside the operating room.
And yet everybody's supposed to be able to deliver equal care once they graduate.
And so going through this training myself, I realized that this is a really interesting problem because I experienced it firsthand.
Yeah, that's really fascinating, right? I've been in this business for about 40 years and I've been in the OR many, many, many times.
And it's trying to keep up with all that too, right? And then going even from one operating room to another, sometimes there's variables just within your own system, right? That's right.
And then with that, it seems like many residency programs are dealing with compressed training time, as you mentioned.
I mean, it has been five years, and sometimes I'm seeing it even more compressed than that.
So how are those structural pressures changing the way young surgeons develop competency today? The system has changed dramatically since I went through training
That always was the case even when I trained, but now it's become front and center, especially in the US where we have ambulatory surgical centers, which are outpatient surgical centers.
Because efficiency has become so important, which we know is excellent for patient outcomes, that focus on efficiency has led to decreasing opportunities for education.
The second is, several years ago, the amount of clinical hours a resident could spend in the hospital were significant than they are today.
And so the clinical hours that you have to learn this information has been reduced.
So the number of procedures today that are available in orthopedics is much higher than they were when I went through residency program.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
