67-Year-Old Gets Navi Mumbai’s First Robotic Bilateral Hip Replacement

For healthcare providers in India’s growing urban corridors, the first robotic bilateral anterior hip replacement in Navi Mumbai is more than a surgical novelty—it validates the clinical and marketing case for investing in capital‑intense robotic platforms outside elite metro hospitals. The case shows how fellowship‑trained surgeons can attract patients from distant states, tilting the competitive field toward technology‑enabled musculoskeletal programs and offering a model for other regional hospitals eyeing the lucrative elective joint replacement market.

UMC Hospitals, a unit of the NSE-listed Unihealth Hospitals Limited, has performed what it claims to be Navi Mumbai's first bilateral robotic direct anterior approach (DAA) total hip replacement, a procedure that fuses two advanced techniques in joint replacement surgery. Announced on August 7, 2026, the complex operation was carried out on a 67-year-old male patient from Karnataka who had been suffering from Stage IV avascular necrosis (AVN) of both hips for nearly three years. The surgeon, Dr. Avinashdev Upadhyay, brought fellowship training in robotic hip and knee replacement from Australia to the case, underscoring the hospital’s strategy of importing globally acquired expertise to serve the domestic market.

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Announced on August 7, 2026, the complex operation was carried out on a 67-year-old male patient from Karnataka who had been suffering from Stage IV avascular necrosis (AVN) of both hips for nearly three years.

The procedure’s significance lies in the marriage of two methods each known to improve outcomes over traditional posterior-approach hip replacement. The direct anterior approach navigates through a natural intermuscular and inter-nervous plane, avoiding cutting major muscles or tendons, thereby reducing post-operative pain, accelerating recovery, and lowering the risk of dislocation. Robotic assistance adds a layer of personalized three-dimensional pre-operative planning and real-time intra-operative guidance for implant alignment, leg length, and component positioning—factors that strongly correlate with implant longevity and patient satisfaction. While unilateral robotic DAA hip replacements have been performed in India’s metropolitan centers, a bilateral case in a tier‑2 satellite city like Navi Mumbai signals that advanced musculoskeletal care is diffusing beyond the traditional hubs of Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai.

The patient’s condition—bilateral Stage IV AVN—is a severe, debilitating disease where blood supply to the femoral head is choked off, leading to bone death, collapse of the joint, and incapacitating pain. In such advanced stages, patients often become wheelchair‑dependent. The fact that a 67‑year‑old traveled hundreds of kilometers from Hubballi to Navi Mumbai illustrates both the serious unmet need and the emerging willingness of Indian patients to seek technology‑driven solutions outside their immediate geography. From a healthcare delivery perspective, this case strengthens the argument that private hospital chains like Unihealth Hospitals can capture medical value travel by investing in niche, high‑value surgical programs and marketing regional ‘firsts’.

For the broader medical devices industry, the implantation of a robotic‑assisted bilateral total hip replacement in a non‑metro location is a bellwether. It demonstrates that suppliers of robotic platforms—such as Stryker’s Mako, Zimmer Biomet’s Rosa, or Smith+Nephew’s Cori—are successfully expanding their installed base into India’s tier‑2 cities. Hospitals in these regions, eager to differentiate themselves, are becoming receptive customers despite the high capital expenditure and per‑procedure cost premiums associated with robotics. The announcement also hints at growing clinician comfort with the DAA technique in India, where the learning curve has been a barrier; a surgeon with Australian fellowship training performing a bilateral case suggests that peer‑to‑peer knowledge transfer is accelerating.