The AAS Membership Committee’s “Membership Spotlight” series – each month in The Academic Surgeon and on the AAS homepage we will introduce you to a member of your association.
Dr. Feibi Zheng is an endocrine surgeon at Houston Methodist Hospital and Assistant Professor of Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College. She attended medical school at the University of California, San Diego. During her surgical residency training at Houston Methodist, she helped to establish the General Surgery Leadership and Health Care Administration Track, an 8-year program which blends clinical surgery training with practical experience in optimizing hospital systems for improved patient care and safety. She then completed her endocrine surgery fellowship at UCLA. In addition to her clinical practice, she is the Assistant Clinical Program Director of Surgical Quality and Population Health for Houston Methodist Hospital, where she is driving the implementation of a telemedicine program for surgical patients who live long distances from specialized centers of care. She also currently serves on the Committee for Perioperative Care of the American College of Surgeons which works to improve the quality of care for surgical patients across the country.
Her research interest focuses on financial toxicity associated with surgery. Her department recently implemented prospective patient collections based on pre-surgical estimates; she is studying how these estimates affected patient’s decision making process, well-being and satisfaction with surgery. She credits AAS with giving her a sense of belonging in this research space because of its broad membership in health services research. Her advice for trainees looking to follow a similar research path would be to select a practical problem that the institution has a desire and culture to address. She finds this field of research exciting since it is actively evolving, as the private sector develops better tools to allow multiple systems to communicate more efficiently and in real time.