There has been a concerted effort in medicine recently to encourage physicians to track their outcomes. Dr. Kruse has been tracking his outcomes for several years now. Tracking patient outcomes has been a game changer in his mission to provide the highest quality care to his patients. Dr. Kruse tracks all of his patients undergoing shoulder arthroscopy and shoulder replacement surgery with an outcome database. Being a shoulder specialist, the two most common surgeries Dr. Kruse performs are rotator cuff repair and total shoulder arthroplasty. By tracking patients outcome scores, he is better able to educate patients about what to expect if they choose to have an operation with objective data gathered from prior patients. In addition, this database allows the comparison of his results to thousands of surgeries performed by other surgeons within the database.
Rotator Cuff Repair
Rotator cuff repair is the most common procedure Dr. Kruse performs in his practice. He averages over 200 of these procedures per year. As you can see from the grafts below his rotator cuff repair patients do quite well. Prior to surgery they rate their shoulder function at less the 48 % of normal and after surgery they report their shoulder functions at 93% of normal. On a pain scale of 1-10 with ten being the worst they start at an average 5 and then drop to less than 1 by one year post operatively. In this graph there is a comparison of Dr. Kruse’s results to the results of over 10,000 surgeries done by other surgeons all over the world. As you can see, Dr. Kruse’s results are superior as his patients start off with more pain and worse function and end up with less pain and better function than the rest of the surgeons in the database.
Shoulder Arthroplasty
Shoulder arthroplasty is the second most common surgery Dr. Kruse performs in his practice, doing on average 150 procedures a year. This volume puts him in the top 1% of surgeons performing this procedure. As you can see by the outcomes collected below Dr. Kruse’s shoulder arthroplasty patients do quite well. On average his patients rate the function of their shoulder at 40% of normal preoperatively and at 1 year they improve to 93% of normal. On average his patients report their pain to be 5.6 of a scale of 1-10 and at the two year post of visit their pain is essentially zero. Again when comparing the results of Dr. Kruse to over 9000 surgeries done by other surgeons in the data base his results are superior in terms of pain and function.
Why you should choose a specialist
It has been shown in multiple studies in orthopaedics that when a surgeon performs a high volume of an operation, their results improve and their complications decrease compared to surgeons who perform lower volumes. Various studies done in different fields of sports and music have shown that those who rise to the top simply practice more often and with a high level of focus. By focusing his practice on shoulders and performing a high volume of procedures Dr. Kruse has been able to achieve superior outcomes in his patients. In addition, he has been able to keep his complications low with an infection rate of <1% in primary shoulder arthroplasty patients.