A 68-year-old woman went into an operating room at South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore with two failing heart valves. She came out having made a little bit of local history: the first robotic double valve repair ever performed on Long Island, done through a few small openings between her ribs instead of an opened chest.

What the surgeons actually did

The operation, announced by Northwell Health on Tuesday, repaired dysfunction in two separate valves, the mitral and the tricuspid, in a single robotic-assisted procedure. Dr. Robert Kalimi, chairman of cardiothoracic surgery at the hospital, and Dr. Joshua Newman, a cardiac surgeon there, performed the repair using the da Vinci 5, the newest generation of the surgical robot.

In conventional open-heart surgery, reaching the valves means a sternotomy, the long incision through the breastbone that defines the recovery as much as the repair does. The robotic approach replaces that with several small ports between the ribs. The surgeons operate the robot's instruments from a console, working with three-dimensional, high-definition visualization, finer instrument control and force feedback that the newest system adds over its predecessor. For the patient, the difference typically shows up as less pain, less blood loss, a shorter hospital stay and a faster return to normal life.

Why two valves at once matters

Repairing a single valve robotically is already a specialized skill. Repairing two distinct areas of dysfunction in one sitting, without converting to an open operation, is a harder problem, and it is the kind of case that historically sent Long Island patients over the bridges and through the tunnels to Manhattan.

That is the real local significance. South Shore University Hospital remains the only hospital on Long Island with an established robotic cardiac surgery program, and each case like this one widens what that program can take on. A patient with disease in both the mitral and tricuspid valves now has a minimally invasive option without leaving Suffolk County.

A program that keeps setting firsts

The Bay Shore team has been here before. About a year ago, Dr. Kalimi and Dr. Newman performed the region's first robotic mitral valve surgery on the earlier da Vinci Xi system. The double valve repair builds directly on that case, moving the program from one valve to two and onto a newer platform in the span of a year.

Hospital leadership frames the progression as the point of the program: proving that the most advanced versions of heart surgery can live at a community hospital in Suffolk County rather than exclusively at Manhattan academic centers. Irene Macyk, the hospital's president, has tied the milestone to that promise of world-class care close to home.

What it means if your cardiologist starts talking about valves

Valve disease is common on an island that skews older, and the words mitral regurgitation tend to arrive with a map attached, because where you have the operation shapes the months that follow. Recovering from a sternotomy is measured in weeks of restrictions. Recovering from port incisions is usually measured in days to a couple of weeks, which matters enormously for an older patient trying to get back to driving, stairs and independence.

Not every patient and not every valve is a candidate for the robotic approach, and a surgical team makes that call case by case. But the option now exists here, at a hospital plenty of South Shore residents can see from Montauk Highway, and the team offering it has twice now been the first in the region to push it further. For Long Islanders facing heart surgery, the shortest road to the newest operation no longer runs through Manhattan.