Rating Cataract Surgeons: The Twin Bridges Score

How can you rate cataract surgeons? It's very difficult to create any kind of rating scale for any  kind of doctor at all, really. There's just so much that goes into the doctor/patient relationship; it's really hard to know what to look at and how to rate that.

Some types of medicine do have measurements that we can evaluate when we wish to find some way to rate quality. Many of the surgical specialties are able to look at how infrequently a particular surgeon has complications in his or her operations, for example. As eye surgery has advanced over the last 20 years or so, every operation that your eye surgeon performs is much safer now, with many fewer complications than even 5 or 10 years ago!

With cataract surgery we can look at a couple of very simple measurements to evaluate the quality of the surgery and the surgical experience. We're in the vision business, after all, so we can look at how well you see! If we look at the best vision possible at the one week mark after cataract surgery we can know something about how well t the surgery was done.

We also know something about eyeglass prescriptions ! At the one month visit after cataract surgery we can look at how close the final eyeglass prescription is to the surgical plan in order to determine if the best cataract implant power was chosen, and if that implant was inserted well.

These two measurements, vision with your best glasses one week after surgery and the amount of prescription in the glasses, are part of what makes up the "Twin Bridges Score", a way to rate cataract surgery and surgeons. Tune in this week as we explain a little more about this score, and to see how Dr. White stacks up in Cleveland and nationally!