Has it come to this? Robots standing in for doctors at the hospital patients’ bedside? Not exactly, but some doctors have found a way to use a videoconferencing robot to check on patients while they’re miles from the hospital. One is at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital. Outfitted with cameras, a screen and microphone, the joystick-controlled robot is guided into the rooms of Dr. Alex Gandsas’ patients where he speaks to them as if he were right there.

Besides his normal morning and afternoon in-person rounds, Gandsas uses the $150,000 robot to visit patients at night or when problems arise. The robot can circle the bed and adjust the position of its two cameras, giving “the perception from the patient’s standpoint that the doctor is there,” the surgeon said. A chart-review study of 376 of the doctor’s patients found that the 92 patients who had additional robotic visits had shorter hospital stays. Gandsas’ study appears in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.