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Dr. Georgiou shares how a patient can locate a good, experienced surgeon.
Dr. Georgiou:
Finding the best surgeon is one of the most important decisions that people will ever make and the way to find the best surgeon is to get a few different inputs. One is, who is the surgeon that has the best reputation in the community or the area where you are going to get care. Reputation can come from other doctors, but also ask nurses about what surgeons have an excellent reputation because nurses see the behind-the-scenes behavior of any doctor and they have a really good perspective. But don’t go on reputation alone.
The second thing you want to look for in finding a good surgeon is getting data from them about how many surgeries just like this they have already done – have they done five, and you are going to be their sixth experiment or have they done 500 and they are well experienced and you know that they have already dealt with many of the issues and complications and challenges of that particular surgery so that if they see that in your situation they immediately know how to deal with it.
And the third thing is to try to look online to see whether or not there’s any data available on a surgeon so that you can understand what their outcomes have been. So, a surgeon could have done 500 surgeries, but they may not have had 500 good outcomes. So how often did they have an infection? How often did they have a death? How often did they have a readmission to the hospital because someone had a complication? All of those are important data points to think about when you are selecting a surgeon.
When you ask your surgeon those questions, as in any relationship, it has to be done respectfully and you have to go into the conversation with all your facts in place, but you as a patient absolutely deserve to know what kind of experience any person has who is going to put a scalpel on your skin and open you up.
About Dr. Archelle Georgiou, M.D.:
Dr. Archelle Georgiou combines her deep knowledge of clinical medicine with a breadth of experience in business and health care administration to pursue her passion for simplifying the health care system. As a practicing physician and as a corporate managed care executive, Dr. Georgiou learned and leveraged the value and importance of simple and compelling communication to influence impacting patients’ personal health care behaviors as well as driving health care purchasing decisions and business growth.
Visit Dr. Georgiou at her website
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