Blog by Business-Minded Surgeon

At ProcedureCard, we don’t wait for the future, we build it.  We have created paperless surgical preference cards. It’s a big deal. Here’s our story:

by Mike Greiwe, MD

By Stephen Ritter, MD

Fear and anxiety are widely regarded as major impediments to patients scheduling surgery. They lead to delays that, in many cases, can exacerbate patients’ problems and negatively impact their quality of life. As surgeons, we can offer our skills and training to help our patients realize life-changing outcomes; but despite all our efforts to make our patients comfortable with surgery, fear and anxiety often dominate our patients’ decisions and prevent them from proceeding with surgery.

by John “Jay” Crawford, MD

When I was a resident in the 1990s, I was told by many staff surgeons that success in my career would be dependent on my mastery of the “three As.” Being polite (and a bit of a suck-up), I would usually feign lack of awareness of this advice (and interest in it) so that the attending’s delicate feelings would not be hurt as he recited this well-worn trope.

Let us say I need to make a trip to Nashville, which is about 400 miles round trip. I can take my car, a vehicle I purchased and maintain, or I can take a flight in which case I outsource all the responsibility and indirect costs to an airline. If I take my car, I simply fill the tank with gas for about $40. If I take the flight, my ticket costs $350. Seems like a no-brainer, right? The flight seems to cost more, but the sophisticated reader will immediately recognize this is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

On my first day as a “cow” (or junior) at United States Military Academy at West Point, I learned a lesson that has stayed with me my entire life and contributes to the lens through which I consider all business issues. During my time at West Point, all cadets were required to take SS307, “Introduction to International Relations.” As I was a pre-med math/science guy, I walked into the first day of this class having no idea what we would be learning, much less expecting to learn anything that would become part of my intellectual bedrock. I was dead wrong in the first 15 minutes of that class.

I remember repeatedly memorizing the Krebs cycle in both college and medical school, and hating it intensely. I did not know much, but I knew I was not interested in any job where knowledge of the Krebs cycle was important, and so I never seriously “learned” it. I would simply “spec and dump” it for the test, which ensured that within 24 hours I could only vaguely remember Krebs had something to do with ATP and acetyl-CoA — and that was always good enough to get me to the next level of training.

In last month’s blog, we defined the equation: Opportunity = Delivery + Neglect, where “opportunity” is the total daily orthopedic value created in our local markets, “delivery” is the total daily orthopedic value delivered — what we do; take care of patients — in our local markets and “neglect” is the total daily orthopedic value left untreated in our local markets.