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.
The statement continued by saying that the survival rates and outcomes for Dr. Bynon’s transplant patients are among the best in the country.
Hm. Can’t help but wonder if perhaps he was trying to weed out patients that would drag down these statistics.
Better the patient die than drag down my average.
Sounds like this guy committed a whole lot of manslaughter.
I remember hearing that the best surgeons have low numbers because they are the ones who take on the most difficult cases.
The motive for the alleged data manipulation is unknown.
Yeah, no. It’s known, they just don’t want to get sued.
The statement continued by saying that the survival rates and outcomes for Dr. Bynon’s transplant patients are among the best in the country.
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.
Yea I don’t think we’re getting the whole story here. I’m very certain that the hospital knew that records were being manipulated. The sheer number of people who have to look at and interact with a patient’s chart guarantees that others knew of the manipulation occuring. The whole “restructuring” comment is not a good look either. I hope the whole system is sued into oblivion.
I have a gut feeling that he may have been practicing bigotry against some demographic or other. Possibly an “out group” like obese people. Wouldn’t surprise me if others in the system turned a blind eye to it. I hope I’m wrong about this.
Also, having worked in a hospital previously, some surgeons are revered as gods. I’ve seen it.
You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I am God.
Malice, right? That monologue could be used pretty well to point out the stupidity of giving all the credit to god and none to the docs who do the actual work, arrogant as it may be. The rest of the movie doesn’t reflect any of it, but still
It’s not impossible but a popular theory in medical circles is that he was trying to steer transplants to patients that he thought would have a higher success rate. Surgeons are judged based on their patient outcome statistics and their bonuses are tied to it as well.
That would make sense. You’d think they would weight those numbers, since they are always being evaluated. Maybe this case will spark some changes, since hospitals are always in CYA mode.
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Texas Penal Code may not agree, but this man is a fucking murderer.
