Dr. Matthew Ninan, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Methodist Healthcare, who practices with UT Medical Group, was recently lauded for delivering care the right way in his multidisciplinary clinic for lung cancer patients.

In the commencement address to graduates of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine on June 12, a New Yorker staff writer, Atul Gawande expanded on his June 1 article about healthcare costs in McAllen, Texas. That article figured into President Obama’s speech of healthcare on June 11. 

In his address, Atul Gawande mentions positive deviants who "join with their colleagues to install electronic health records, and look for ways to provide easier phone and e-mail access, or offer expanded hours. They hire an extra nurse to monitor diabetic patients more closely, and to make sure that patients don’t miss their mammograms and pap smears or their cancer follow-up. They think about how to create the local structures and incentives to make better, safer, more appropriate care possible." 

One of these positive deviants is "a thoracic surgeon named Dr. Mathew Ninan, who joined a group of pulmonologists, surgeons, and oncologists in Memphis to change the quality of care for lung-cancer patients in their city. 

“Our approach is simple,” he told me. “We will see every patient regardless of insurance status. We will make every attempt to see patients jointly in one visit. We will discuss every new patient that we see in a multi-disciplinary format on the same day and decide on a plan of treatment. We will follow every patient to track whether they receive the right treatment. And we will enroll as many patients as we can in clinical trials dedicated to improving lung-cancer care.”

To insure that unnecessary costs are avoided, they took yet further steps. The toughest was that the surgeons agreed to do no operations on lung-cancer patients unless the pulmonologist and oncologist agree that it is indicated. This is radical. 

“I have had to swallow my ego repeatedly to stick to this principle,” he said. Sometimes he’s had to persuade them an operation was best. More often, however, they persuade him to drop his plan and with it the revenue. And he did—because it was the right thing to do.

Read the full article in The New Yorker.