Your surgical career spans thousands of cases. Where's the record?

Your surgical career spans thousands of cases. Where's the record?

Logbooks end at residency. After that, there's nothing.

No cumulative procedure volume. No documented outcomes. No portable record of what you've actually done that travels with you when you change institutions, take visiting cases, or apply for privileges somewhere new. Your career exists in your memory and nowhere else.

I'm exploring an idea: a permanent surgical logbook that lives with you for your entire career. You log cases by specialty, procedure type, and your role. Outcomes tracked over time. And here's the part that makes it different from a spreadsheet you keep yourself -- the hospitals and facilities you've worked at can counter-sign your entries. That verification comes from the institution, not from you.

The result is something between a pilot's flight log and a CV. Verifiable. Portable. Yours.

It would be free. Your data, your control over what's visible and to whom.

What I actually want to know:

Would you use something like this, or does it solve a problem you don't actually feel?

Is the institutional counter-signing realistic -- would the facilities you've worked at actually do this?

What would make you trust it enough to log your cases there consistently?

Is "a permanent verified record of your career" genuinely appealing, or does it sound good but feel unnecessary in practice?

Be direct. I'd rather hear "this solves nothing" now than after building it.

reddit.com
u/Riz-zler — 13 days ago

Your surgical career spans thousands of cases. Where's the record?

​

Logbooks end at residency. After that, there's nothing.

No cumulative procedure volume. No documented outcomes. No portable record of what you've actually done that travels with you when you change institutions, take visiting cases, or apply for privileges somewhere new. Your career exists in your memory and nowhere else.

I'm exploring an idea: a permanent surgical logbook that lives with you for your entire career. You log cases by specialty, procedure type, and your role. Outcomes tracked over time. And here's the part that makes it different from a spreadsheet you keep yourself -- the hospitals and facilities you've worked at can counter-sign your entries. That verification comes from the institution, not from you.

The result is something between a pilot's flight log and a CV. Verifiable. Portable. Yours.

It would be free. Your data, your control over what's visible and to whom.

What I actually want to know:

Would you use something like this, or does it solve a problem you don't actually feel?

Is the institutional counter-signing realistic -- would the facilities you've worked at actually do this?

What would make you trust it enough to log your cases there consistently?

Is "a permanent verified record of your career" genuinely appealing, or does it sound good but feel unnecessary in practice?

Be direct. I'd rather hear "this solves nothing" now than after building it.

reddit.com
u/Riz-zler — 13 days ago

How do you evaluate a specialist you've never worked with?

How do you evaluate a specialist you've never worked with?

Not their CV. Not their degree. Not what they say about themselves.

I mean actually evaluate them -- procedure volume, complication history, what they've done and where. The stuff that tells you whether to trust someone with your patients and your OT.

Right now that information largely doesn't exist in any accessible form. Credentialing processes verify that someone has a licence. They don't tell you whether the surgeon has done 40 of these cases or 400. Whether their complication rate is within normal range. Which facilities have actually worked with them and would vouch for them.

The idea I'm exploring: a verified professional logbook for surgeons and specialists. Career-long, procedure-level, with institutional verification built in -- meaning the facilities a surgeon has worked at can counter-sign their entries. Not self-reported volume. Independently confirmed.

As an administrator or department head, you'd be able to see a verified record before you credential someone, before you extend privileges, before you bring in a locum for a case.

What I want to know:

Does this solve a real problem in your credentialing or privileging process, or do you have systems that already handle this adequately?

Would institutional counter-signing actually carry weight in your evaluation -- or is it the kind of verification that looks good but doesn't change your decision?

What's missing from this that would make it genuinely useful to you?

Would you trust a platform like this, or does credentialing feel too consequential to outsource to a third-party tool?

No pitch here. Trying to understand whether the problem is real before building the solution.

reddit.com
u/Riz-zler — 13 days ago