TRANSPARENCY

CASE LOGS AND COMPLICATIONS

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find reliable, easy-to-understand information about specific doctors or practices. You can check out physician reviews on sites such as Yelp and Angie’s List, but do you really want to find a doctor the same way you do a restaurant or plumber? Probably not. Medicine and healthcare services cannot be reviewed the same way as other customer-service-type industries because we don’t have customers, we have patients. Like the old adage about medicine says, some times you really do “feel worse before you feel better.” That is a truism in medicine that is sometimes unavoidable. We cannot just “customer-service” away or gift wrap medicine in this way to make it good medicine. We actually have to practice good medicine and that means that we cannot be evaluated with patient satisfaction reviews and surveys. It’s about the patient-doctor relationship. It’s also about good training, building on skills and abilities, applying new technology and therapies the right way and always aspiring to excellence. It’s also about collaboration, teamwork, efficiency and respect. A team of UC Davis researchers found that people who are the most satisfied with their doctors are more likely to be hospitalized, accumulate more health-care and drug expenditures, and have higher death rates than patients who are less satisfied with their care (UCDavis Newsroom and study link). This page is dedicated to transparency. Here you will be able to see my case logs during my general surgery and surgical critical care training. I will also update this page of my case logs as I continue to practice and any of my complication statistics and malpractice claims.