Monmouth Medical Center offers ‘smarter’ knee replacements

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Monmouth Medical Center, an RWJBarnabas Health facility, is making strides in orthopedic care by offering what it describes as the world’s only smart knee technology for total knee replacement. 

The Long Branch health care provider announced May 31 that it is one of only a few hospitals in New Jersey to offer the technology: an implantable device that allows physicians to monitor a patient’s progress remotely and collect data post-surgery. A RWJBarnabas representative confirmed with NJBIZ that the technology is Zimmer Biomet’s Persona IQ, the same device that Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck announced it began offering in December 2022.

Joint replacement specialists – including Dr. Bert Parcells, Dr. Arthur Mark and Dr. David Dickerson from Monmouth Medical Center as well as Dr. Karl Blum from Community Medical Center, a fellow RWJBarnabas Health facility in Toms River – use the new technology to monitor data such as steps taken, average walking speed and range of motion.  

“We know that obstacles and setbacks can come with knee replacement surgery, but with the smart knee we use kinematic data to comfortably diagnose what is causing the setback and provide solutions, including proper medications and physical therapy plans to solve the problem,” said Parcells, who performed Monmouth Medical Center’s first smart knee replacement surgery.  

The data is wirelessly transmitted to a patient’s home base station for a year after surgery and then securely delivered to a HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based platform, where both the orthopedic surgeon and patient can check it. According to Monmouth Medical Center, the device has a battery life of at least 10 years, allowing for a decade of data access.