A 2,000-kilometre operation
On 10 September 2026, in the orthopaedic robotics engineering centre at Jishuitan Hospital's Xinlongze campus in Beijing, Professor Jiang Xieyuan — director of the National Orthopaedic Medical Centre and the hospital's president — connected by remote platform with an operating room at Foshan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, about 2,000 km away. The patient was a 58-year-old woman with a fractured left femoral neck.
Under the arrangement described, the Foshan team carried out the pre-operative reduction and imaging, which was transmitted live to Beijing. Jiang planned the paths for three cannulated screws remotely; the robot arm moved into position to assist, and the three screws were placed along the planned routes. "Close to anatomical reduction" was how Jiang described the result, adding that at this age a well-reduced, well-fixed fracture should heal in more than 95% of cases, allowing the patient to keep her own hip joint.
Scale and accuracy behind the single case
The hospital frames the case within a much larger programme. Jishuitan has researched orthopaedic robotics since 2002 and now operates 9 surgical robots across trauma, spine, joint, bone tumour, hand and sports-injury surgery. It reports a cumulative total of 20,000 robotic procedures — described as the largest series at any single hospital in China — including 4,469 procedures on the TiRobot platform in January–August 2026 alone.
On accuracy, the engineering centre's clinical programme lead Li Jinqi described the change concretely: manual placement of a guidewire relies partly on feel through skin and muscle, with a risk of injuring vessels and nerves if the cortex is breached, and image-based planning exposes patient and staff to repeated X-ray shots. With the robot, placement is sub-millimetre and a wire that used to take ten or twenty minutes goes in, in his words, in three seconds. He also noted the current limitation honestly: the arm navigates and positions, but the surgeon still drives the wire.
Volume and precision figures are institutional statistics, and the remote case is a single procedure. They show mature, large-scale routine use of robotics — not, by themselves, that robotic surgery improves patient outcomes versus non-robotic surgery. That question is being addressed separately, including by randomised comparisons elsewhere in China.
What comes next
The hospital says TiRobot 4.0 is in development, intended to plan automatically rather than require manual planning, and to cut with high-energy tools rather than only guide wires. Beijing has included robotic surgery and related consumables in its insurance coverage, which lowers the cost barrier for patients; the National Healthcare Security Administration, which visited after the demonstration, said it would support standardised nationwide data collection on robotic surgery.
Relevance to international patients
For patients travelling to Beijing, the practical relevance is precision and minimally invasive technique in routine bone surgery — screw placement through small incisions, fewer X-ray exposures, faster recovery — rather than remote surgery itself, which is currently aimed at reaching patients inside China. This summary belongs to the Bones, Joints, Spine & Muscles and Injuries, Burns & Trauma health areas.