ALSGBI and Inovus Medical extend exclusive partnership on LapPass curriculum

Inovus Medical – the global healthcare simulation company – this week announced that it has extended its exclusive contract to manufacture and supply the LapPass surgical training curriculum in collaboration with the Association of Laparoscopic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland (ALSGBI).

Launched by ALSGBI in 2015, the LapPass is a nationally recognised certificate of proficiency in the technically demanding skills required for laparoscopic surgery and the only validated laparoscopic skills curriculum in the UK. The LapPass certificate can be added to a trainee surgeon’s portfolio when a series of timed laparoscopic skills tests are successfully passed.

The original contract to manufacture and supply the LapPass skill tasks was signed between the parties in 2019. Shortly after the agreement, Inovus announced it had integrated the LapPass curriculum into its ground-breaking LapAR laparoscopic simulation platform. The integration with LapAR allows surgical trainees to track their progress and performance on LapPass through objective metrics. The video review feature of the platform allows them to gain remote feedback from senior surgeons and offers a solution for remote certification. Since it’s integration with LapAR, there have been over 3,300 LapPass procedures recorded on the platform with hundreds of hours of training completed and tracked.

The highly successful collaboration will be extended for a further three years, providing an opportunity for Inovus and ALSGBI to further extend the reach of the LapPass programme and work on integrating the curriculum into surgical training pathways across the UK and globally. The agreement to extend the contract comes just weeks after the LapAR platform received accreditation from the Royal College of Surgeons of England. As a result of the accreditation, trainees will now be able to accrue Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points for time spent training on LapAR and LapPass.

Inovus Medical CTO, Jordan Van Flute said

It has been a pleasure to work with the ALSGBI team over the last three years and we are excited to continue this collaboration. Following our recent accreditation with the RCS, trainees will now be able to earn CPD points while performing LapPass training on the LapAR, this will add a massive amount of value to trainees and, we hope, drive even higher levels of engagement with this important curriculum. We are particularly excited about the unfolding possibilities in machine learning as we start to use movement data from LapPass procedures to identify patterns in behaviour and decision making.

Jordan Van Flute, Inovus Medical CTO

ALSGBI President, David Mahon said,

“The ALSGBI is delighted to extend our partnership with Inovus Medical. Perhaps our most important function as a society is to promote minimally invasive surgical education. Since our partnership began, Inovus has helped the surgeons of tomorrow carry out almost 3,500 laparoscopic training procedures as part of LapPass – we look forward to continuing our collaboration and spreading this training even wider in future.”