On July 19, 2025, something extraordinary happened—without boarding a plane, stepping into a hospital, or even crossing a time zone, a cardiac surgeon in France reached into a patient’s chest in India and repaired a hole in their heart.

This wasn’t science fiction. It was robotic reality.

Dr. Sudhir Srivastava, Chairman and CEO of SS Innovations, performed the world’s first intercontinental robotic cardiac telesurgery using the company’s proprietary SSi Mantra 3 system. He sat at a surgical console in Strasbourg, France. The patient lay 4,000 miles away in an operating room in Indore, India. And the robot? It bridged the entire planet—with surgical precision and near-zero latency.

Let that sink in. A human heart was operated on, across continents, in real time.

The operation—a robotic atrial septal defect closure—wasn’t just successful. It was flawless. No technical hiccups. No lag. No compromise in control. The surgical robot became an extension of the surgeon’s hands, despite the fact that those hands were half a world away.

This is not the future of surgery. This is now.

What SS Innovations has pulled off isn’t just a technological milestone—it’s a geopolitical earthquake in the world of healthcare access. If the world’s best cardiac surgeons can now operate across oceans, why should geography determine survival? Why should someone in rural India, sub-Saharan Africa, or an island nation ever again die from a condition that could be treated—if only the right hands were nearby?

With 35 telesurgeries already under their belt—including 10 cardiac cases and a recent robotic bariatric procedure spanning hundreds of miles across India—SS Innovations is fast proving that surgical borders are dissolving. Their system doesn’t just cut with robotic finesse. It cuts through the logistics of time, cost, distance, and scarcity of expertise.

And they’re not alone. Intuitive Surgical, MicroPort, and others are racing to stake their claim in the telesurgery frontier. But SS Innovations just made history. While others demoed procedures on tissue models, they operated on a real human heart, in real time, from another continent.

This isn’t remote surgery. This is globalized surgery. Surgical care is no longer confined to physical hospitals or cities with elite medical centers. It’s becoming an on-demand service, deployed from wherever the expertise resides.

And it poses a thrilling, slightly unsettling question: In a world where surgeons can now save lives from across the planet… what exactly does it mean to be in the operating room?

The hospital of the future may not be a place. It may be a network—and the best surgeon for you might be 4,000 miles away, fingers on a console, guiding robotic arms to your beating heart.