A Hundred Cases a Year and You Remember the Complications, Not the Routine
Every surgeon builds a mental catalog of their cases. The problem is that memory is biased toward the dramatic — the unexpected bleed, the anatomy that didn't match the scan, the case that went sideways at 2 AM. The routine cases blur together. And when you need to present your operative volume for board certification, or when a patient returns eighteen months later with a recurrence, the mental catalog fails.
This template is a personal surgical logbook built for the realities of how cases are actually tracked outside the EMR.
Role Tracking: Surgeon, Assistant, Teacher, Observer
The Role in Surgery field captures four positions. This distinction matters for training documentation. A chief resident logging 200 cases needs to separate primary surgeon cases from assist cases for their operative log. A teaching surgeon who supervised a trainee through a procedure documents it differently from a case they performed independently. Observer entries create a reference library of techniques seen at visiting institutions or during proctored procedures.
The Type of Surgery field — Elective vs Emergency — splits the case mix for credentialing purposes. Trauma programs need emergency case volume. Specialty boards want to see elective case diversity. One filter gives you each subset instantly.
Twelve Image Slots Across Three Categories
Four X-ray images. Six CT/MRI images. Six general pictures. Each category has its own findings text field preceding the images. This structure follows the actual workflow: review the imaging, write your interpretation, then attach the key images.
The separation between X-ray and CT/MRI matters because these are different stages of the diagnostic workup. The X-ray findings might show a fracture pattern. The CT findings reveal the fragment displacement and articular involvement that determines your surgical approach. Having both in the same record with distinct fields means you can search for all cases where CT findings mentioned "comminution" without wading through X-ray notes.
The six general PICTURE fields at the bottom are for intraoperative photos, wound documentation, and post-op clinical images. When a patient returns to clinic with a concern about their scar, pulling up the intraoperative photo from six months ago shows whether the current appearance is expected healing or a developing complication.
The Follow-Up Chain That Catches Failures
Date of Discharge, Next Clinic Date, 1st Clinic Return, 2nd Clinic Return — this is a temporal chain that tracks the patient through the post-operative period. The Complications field and Re-Intervention field capture outcomes that deviate from the expected course.
When you filter your case database by Complications containing any text, you get your personal complication rate. When you cross-reference that against surgery type, surgeon role, and elective vs emergency, you see the patterns: which procedures carry higher complication rates in your hands, whether emergency cases have disproportionate re-intervention rates, whether cases where you assisted had different outcomes than cases where you operated.
Discharge Meds as a free-text field captures the medication list sent home with the patient — the information that's buried fifteen clicks deep in the EMR but that you need at your fingertips when the patient calls the office on day three asking whether they should still be taking the anticoagulant.