09/10/2026
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=997472833305667&id=100091288794806&mibextid=wwXIfr
1,380 KM APART👨🏻⚕️
A surgeon in Pampanga has successfully operated on a patient in Cotabato City while sitting more than a thousand kilometers away.
On September 5, Dr. Ryan Quiambao of Jose B. Lingad Memorial General Hospital in Pampanga performed a robotic cholecystectomy on a patient at Cotabato Regional and Medical Center.
The procedure involved removing the patient’s gallbladder while the two hospitals were about 1,380 kilometers apart.
Instead of standing beside the operating table, Dr. Quiambao controlled the SSI Mantra Robotic Surgery System remotely from Pampanga. His movements were transmitted to the robotic instruments being used on the patient in Cotabato, while a medical team remained physically present with the patient throughout the procedure.
And the connection worked both ways.
Later that same day, surgeons Dr. Al-Jazzer M. Angas and Dr. Louis Gerard Agustin of CRMC in Cotabato remotely performed the same type of operation on a patient at JBLMGH in Pampanga.
According to the DOH, both procedures were completed safely in less than an hour with minimal blood loss. The surgeries were also provided at no cost to the patients under the government’s Zero Balance Billing policy.
The milestone marked the country’s first long-distance regional robotic telesurgeries between Philippine hospitals, connecting surgical teams in Luzon and Mindanao through robotic technology and a high-speed network.
For a country where specialist care can sometimes require patients to travel across provinces or islands, the technology points to a future where some forms of surgical expertise may be brought closer to patients without requiring the surgeon to be in the same hospital.
A surgeon in Pampanga and a patient in Cotabato were 1,380 kilometers apart, but for this operation, technology helped close the distance.
