Why Quality Matters for Your Surgery
When you need surgery, you want the best care possible—great results, fewer complications, and a smooth recovery. High-quality surgery not only helps you heal faster but also saves money by avoiding extra hospital stays, follow-up treatments, or fixes for mistakes. For example, surgeons who use techniques like minimally invasive surgery, which use smaller incisions, also mean less pain and quicker healing, can cut your hospital time by days and lower the chance of problems, saving thousands of dollars. Likewise, proven special recovery programs (called ERAS), can reduce costs for you and the healthcare system.
But here’s the catch: the way surgeons are paid often rewards them for doing more surgeries, not necessarily better ones. This system, called Relative Value Units (RVUs), doesn’t focus on how well a surgeon performs or how their patients recover. So, a surgeon doing 400 gallbladder surgeries a year might be paid the same whether their patients have complications or not. That’s why it’s so important to find a surgeon who prioritizes quality—someone who uses the latest techniques and has a strong track record.
The tricky part? It’s hard to find clear information about a surgeon’s experience or success rate. There’s no public website where you can see, for example, “Dr. Smith does 400 gallbladder surgeries a year with almost no complications.” This makes it tough to compare surgeons and choose the best one for you. To get the best care, ask your doctor or hospital for details about a surgeon’s experience, complication rates, and whether they use advanced methods like ERAS or minimally invasive surgery. Push for quality, because it means better health for you and fewer costs down the road. We need a healthcare system that rewards surgeons for great outcomes and shares their performance data openly—until then, asking the right questions is your best tool for finding a top surgeon.
Why The Entire Care Journey Matters
When it comes to surgery, quality isn’t just about what happens in the operating room—it’s about your whole experience, from before surgery to your full recovery. Problems like infections, unexpected hospital readmissions, ER visits, or slow healing can make recovery harder and more expensive, adding billions to healthcare costs each year. By focusing on quality across every step—preparation, surgery, and recovery—hospitals and doctors can prevent these issues, helping you heal faster.
But here’s the problem: the U.S. healthcare system doesn’t always consider the whole journey. It uses scattered measurements that don’t give a full picture or show how surgeons, care teams, hospitals, or health systems perform together. There’s no single, clear way to track your entire care experience or hold anyone accountable for complications during recovery.
We need a system with better, connected measurements to ensure top-quality care for every patient. That’s the role of Informed+ Surgical.