The Post and Courier – OrthAlign’s Handheld Navigation Finds a Sweet Spot as Outpatient Joint Replacements Surge
By Tom Corwin on February 23, 2026
Original article
Her soccer days were long over, but Kim Kaslick, 55, of Summerville still carried a lingering reminder of a significant injury that resulted in her left leg being shorter than the right.
When she went to get her left hip replaced in December, Dr. Dustin Hambright decided to make her the first patient to get a new hip using the Lantern Hip surgical navigation system.
It fixed an imbalance she had been living with since she was 13.
“I feel like I can walk better than I ever remember walking,” Kaslick said.
The small computer placed on the patient’s leg allows the surgeon to see how the replacement hip will line up on three different planes, allowing for adjustments to get a better alignment. It also quickly provides the surgeon a way to compensate for a longer or shorter leg to easily correct it. It requires less X-ray and fluoroscopy, so less radiation to the patient, and provides a similar view to a million-dollar robot surgery system without the long setup and the cost.
The device could be getting a lot more work in the months and years ahead. There are more than 544,000 hip replacements a year already and that number is expected to grow to more than 719,000 in 2040 and to hit nearly 2 million by 2060, according to a 2023 study.
Kim Kaslick holds onto the leashes for her dogs Charlie and Bernie while on a walk in their neighborhood, Thursday, February 12, 2026, in Summerville.
Replacements also increasingly shifted from a hospital-based inpatient surgery to one where the patient could go home the same day and get the new hip outside the hospital.
Between 2010 and 2021, nearly 90 percent of hip replacements were performed as inpatient hospital procedures, but that decreased significantly between 2019 and 2021 while outpatient hip surgeries increased more than 750 percent, one study found.
That was largely driven by the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020 and the need to keep beds free for those patients while still accommodating joint replacements, the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons concluded in 2024.
The need for less capital-intensive, more nimble surgery systems increased along with it. The Lantern Hip system fits with that, said Hambright of Novant Health Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Mount Pleasant.
It is a computer system “that’s the size of a phone that lets us optimize placement of the components and helps optimize leg lengths, which are two of the key parts of the hip replacement,” he said.
Hambright has the patient lying on their side with the small computer mounts on pins on the pelvis just above the hip area. The computer has an attached probe that can be swung around on an arm to take readings from different angles, registering different views of the hip. The Lantern Hip adds a third dimension, like a triangulation, that shows in real-time how the hip components are fitting into the body. During the removal of the old hip and placement of the new components, the body can move around “quite a bit” so the computer shows in real-time how the body is aligned and can then be adjusted, Hambright said.
Kim Kaslick works from the dining table of her home, Thursday, February 12, 2026, in Summerville. Kaslick recently underwent hip replacement surgery and opted to use the new Lantern Hip surgical navigation system for the process.
While doing the normal trial placement of the hip cup and replacement head to see how it looks, the system can show the leg length and whether any adjustment is needed. Ordinarily, Hambright said, he would have an X-ray and manually check on the table and see if it lined up.
“Having the computer to help get that right is tremendous,” he said. Having a third view to compare the alignment “really lets you zero in and get things almost as perfect as you can get it.”
Some of that capability and enhanced view of the surgical site was already available using a surgical robotic system, Hambright said. But those take a while to set up properly and can add time to surgery cases. They can also cost $1 million to $2.5 million, depending on the system, so it involves a hefty investment. It is also expensive to maintain and can tie up operating room time.
Having a small, mobile computer device “overall, to the whole system, I think it’s a huge savings,” Hambright said.
It’s the results of the surgery that matter to patients, however, and Kaslick has been through a few of them.
Having played soccer most of her life, she admits she was “a little hard on the equipment.” Kaslick stepped in a hole and tore the ACL in her right knee, and later it just “disintegrated,” she said. That prompted her first knee replacement, followed soon after by the other knee.
It was ironically while she was in physical therapy rehabilitating after that surgery that she tore the labrum in her left hip. She kept trying to put surgery off, first with more physical therapy and then a shot in the hip.
“The shot did nothing,” Kaslick said.
She went again to see Hambright, who had done both of her knee replacements, and asked how long after the shot would she have to wait to have the hip replaced. Three months, he told her.
The three months was up on Dec. 16, and she had the surgery the next day.
Before, Kaslick would walk the dogs with the aid of a cane, limping along in pain. She would see others smoothly walking by and think to herself, “Wow, that would be nice.”
Now, “I walk very straight, which is nice,” Kaslick said. “It’s easy.”