DR DESAI’S PERFORMANCE AT NORTH CAROLINA HOSPITAL WORRIED COLLEAGUES
Dr Sapan Desai was always a striver. During high school in the Chicago suburbs, he took 13 Advanced Placement classes, according to an article in The Daily Herald, a local newspaper. He acquired enough college credits to graduate from the University of Illinois at Chicago at 19.
“His goal was to be the first person at UIC that ever graduated college in one year,” said Peter Okkema, a biology professor in whose lab the young undergraduate worked. Desai seemed eager to impress people, the professor recalled, but never sought advice or guidance.
Doctor with a law degree?
He entered a joint MD-PhD programme at the university; his doctoral adviser, professor Anna Lysakowski, remembers him as “very bright, very quick.” She also said he told her he was enrolled at John Marshall Law School. (The school has no record of him, a spokeswoman said, and the degree is not on his resume). Several doctors who knew Desai after he moved to Duke University Medical Centre for his residency in 2006 recalled his saying he had a law degree.
Over the next five years, his performance and a pattern of behaviour at the North Carolina hospital worried
colleagues, according to physicians who worked with him there.
In interviews, Drs Vanessa Olcese, Mani Daneshmand, Dawn Elfenbein and 10 others said there were broad concerns inside the surgery department about Desai.
In one instance, Desai did not respond to pages from nurses during an overnight shift while on call, recalled Olcese. When she asked about the missed pages, he said he had been resuscitating an infant by performing a rare, complicated procedure — an incident the charge nurse said never occurred, according to Olcese and another doctor present for Desai’s explanation.
“He was essentially a giant roadblock that you had to work around,” said Olcese, now a neurocritical care doctor at Wexner Medical Centre in Columbus, Ohio. “You didn’t want him to bring you down with him.”
In 2008 or early 2009, Olcese and another chief resident shared concerns about Desai with their supervisors — senior physicians and faculty at Duke — during discussions about whether to promote him to the next year of residency. It is unclear what the faculty members discussed during their private deliberations, but ultimately, Desai was moved up. A Duke spokeswoman would confirm only his time there.
We did this [setting up medical database] because it was an opportunity to help. We’re not making any money from this. This is why I went into medicine.” Dr Sapan Desai | Owner of Surgispher, a health care analytics company