German hospitals are increasingly being asked to improve efficiency while striving to enhance the quality of standards that will afford a high level of patient safety and quality in the treatment process. The main objective of this Ph.D. thesis was to analyze whether digital support software used during surgery has a positive effect on selected clinical process and quality ratios in orthopedics. Two retrospective case-control studies of 383 hip joint endoprosthetic implantations and 297 knee joint endoprosthetic implantations were conducted at a German hospital between 2015 and 2020. Statistically significant results were evaluated commercially within the framework of the German diagnosis-related groups. Results show that the use of digitally assisted surgery leads to significantly shorter hospital stays and reduces postoperative complications, which in turn has a direct impact on treatment costs and hospital revenues.

Benjamin Lahmann: Benjamin Lahmann, Ph.D. is a registered male nurse and holds a doctorate in Business Management and Economics. He is considered to be an expert in the German healthcare sector and focuses on digital process standardization along the clinical pathway, digitally assisted surgery and the evaluation of performance and quality ratios in hospitals. For the past nine years, he has been working for the medical technology and pharmaceutical corporate group Johnson & Johnson Medical, where he currently leads a sales unit as Regional Business Manager.