Richard Hart, MD, FRCSC
Founder/CEO NextGen Surgery
Dr.
Hart was recruited to St Joseph's Health Centre, a teaching hospital within the
Dept of Surgery, University of Toronto in 2001, to establish a specialized
multidisciplinary Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic surgical service. Within eight
years, having developed into a tertiary care referral centre and one of the
busiest services in the province, all as a single surgeon, the hospital was
awarded the designation HPB "Centre of Excellence" by Cancer Care
Ontario. Dr Hart credits the commitment, dedication, and discipline of everyone
involved in the team for helping deliver exceptional patient outcomes with
operative morbidity and mortality rates consistent with the best centres in the
world. In addition, Dr Hart was actively
involved in the education and training of residents, fellows and practicing
surgeons, organizing and providing expert opinion for multidisciplinary tumour
boards and educational rounds as well as contributing to clinical research
within the Division of Surgery.
With a passion for teaching the requisites of
elite performance, his focus has turned to surgical innovation
and simulation with the creation of NextGen Surgery, a platform based on the
concept that surgeons
are elite performers, often compared with high performance athletes where
mind-body awareness, the integration of the central and autonomic nervous
system in the service of self-regulation and adaptability to create stress
resiliency, is the key to success. These are principals and practices he was
taught as an athlete while competing and representing Canada in sport and
carried through his own surgical training, understanding that the best skilled
technician in the world in any domain will not achieve mastery if they can’t
self regulate in critical moments. At NextGen Surgery, we are applying psychophysiological
testing and training using biometric data capture and brain computer interfaces
to enable you to gain control of mind body states normally outside of conscious
awareness and then teaching the skills to access and transfer these states from
the controlled simulation environment into the uncontrolled performance
environment. The mission of NextGen is to transform how physicians, surgeons
and nurses, elite performers who populate the field of healthcare are trained
for the cognitive, emotional, physiological, and physical skills required to
deliver optimum performance when it matters most, during the critical moments
inherent in every procedure that directly impacts patient safety and surgical
outcomes.