The motive for the alleged data manipulation is unknown.
The Chronicle notes that Memorial Hermann has seen increasing numbers of liver transplant candidates die or become too sick for a transplant while on the waitlist. According to federal data, in 2021, only four patients died or got too sick for a transplant while on the hospital’s liver transplant waiting list. In 2022, the number increased to 11, and in 2023, it was 14. So far this year, there are five patients who have died or gotten too sick while waiting.
Yeah, no. It’s known, they just don’t want to get sued.
And there it is, in plain sight. It’s not because his surgical skills were godlike, it’s because he was ensuring that only the very healthiest and most committed patients were going to get organs.
Falsifying eligibility data for transplant patients so that only the healthiest make it to the top is a great way to ensure that your own surgical success rates are much higher than anyone else’s.
Cherry-picking surgical patients has gone on since people started keeping score, this is nothing new.
There is a much better article on the NY Times about this situation and, while it’s not included in the archive link, every top comment beneath it was “yup, cherry-picking patients” as the motivation. Archive Link
Oh, wow. This makes total sense. I couldn’t imagine why he’d do this except if he disliked or was biased against certain patients. But ginning up his stats makes complete sense. Thanks for clarifying!
The NY Times article makes it much clearer; the example they gave was that this surgeon would enter a patient with the age of a toddler, and then enter the weight of the toddler as 300 lbs. In other words, he went out of his way to make the data on a particular patient so self-conflicting it would zero out that patient’s place on the rankings for a new liver.
Whatever the actual scoring system or algorithm, whatever this surgeon was doing broke it entirely for any patient he chose, and he did it often enough to get both his liver and his kidney transplant programs shuttered indefinitely.
So it was absolutely certain it was not fat-fingering or a series of oversights in entering patient data, it was not faulty software, it was not a one-off, and this deliberate practice had the specific, individually directed effect of breaking the transplant ranking entirely for that particular patient and none of the rest.
There aren’t a lot of “could-have-beens” left after you eliminate all that. I would imagine they are also looking at the real data of the patients who were sent to the bottom of the rankings by this surgeon just to see what their scores would have been, had the data been entered correctly. If the data itself isn’t enough of a smoking gun, that will be.
So a plot point to show how Dr. Strange was a cartoon level narcissist is an actual problem in real life?
Strange didn’t prevent individuals from getting surgery; he just elected to not perform surgeries himself for which A: he believed he could not fix the underlying issue, or B: the surgery could be performed successfully by someone less specialized. Strange isn’t evil, he just knew that maximizing the amount of impact he could have on the world required him to prioritize patients that needed his exceptional skills (and were fixable). Whether you think he did this to inflate his record or from the goodness of his heart is up for debate, but those patients received care if they were fixable (Pangborn likely was legitimately unfixable by conventional methods).
This guy’s actions, on the other hand, actually caused the patients to be declared ineligible on the provider’s systems, thereby denying them from receiving the procedures at all.