2014 Salute to Health Care Honoree: Dr. David Zolfaghari

Few couples in Springfield split employment at the city’s crosstown hospital rivals. The Zolfagharis are among them.

Dr. David Zolfaghari is a cardiothoracic surgeon at CoxHealth-affiliated Ferrell-Duncan Clinic, and his wife, Dr. Mary Beth Kurz Zolfaghari, works as an emergency room physician at Mercy Hospital Springfield.

“We don’t talk about medicine,” David Zolfaghari says of how the two make it work at home with their three kids.

With his days starting at 6 a.m. and typically running 10 to 12 hours, including an on-call schedule every other weekend and for evening emergencies, Zolfaghari credits his wife with enabling his career. Her schedule, while demanding, is much more structured, he says.

Zolfaghari got his schooling on the East Coast before receiving a call from  Dr. John Steinberg  in Springfield. A Ferrell-Duncan surgeon in the same specialty, Steinberg got ahold of Zolfaghari’s curriculum vitae in 1997 and liked what he saw.

“I really thought I was going to stay on the East Coast and practice in Washington, D.C.,” Zolfaghari recalls.

It was a recruitment that stuck.

Zolfaghari and Steinberg have been cardiothoracic surgeon partners since 1997. They each typically perform two or three operations a day, with the surgeries taking two to four hours apiece. Zolfaghari sets aside four days a week to operate and one day in the office.

During his 17-year career, Zolfaghari says he’s performed 3,000 open-heart surgeries and 1,000 lung surgeries.

“We tend to see, still, a lot of lung cancer, because of the high smoking percentage in this area,” Zolfaghari says.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only seven states claimed more cigarette smokers than Missouri, where one in four people regularly used tobacco in 2012.

“In the heart surgery world, we do more operations now for valvular disease,” he adds. “Because patients are living longer, things like (aortic stenosis) are more common.”

However, the trend for minimally invasive procedures is less applicable in his discipline.

“They’ve never replaced the gold standard, which is open-heart surgery,” he says.

Zolfaghari has served 10 years on the board for Ferrell-Duncan, a multidisciplinary physician corporation led by eight elected physician directors and an executive director. He’s been president for seven years, and four years ago, he joined the CoxHealth hospital board.

“I’ve been deeply involved with the integration talks and process to get the hospital and physicians closer together as we try to prepare for the changes in medicine,” he says.

With the federal government seeking quality parameters and evidence of the shared risks in patient care, Zolfaghari says hospitals and clinics need a single computer system, quality committees and physicians involved in administrative decisions.

“We are now integrating so we can address the problems together – contracts, risk sharing, bundle payments,” he says. “The hospital and the doctor have to figure out, together, how to treat that problem in a cost-efficient way.”[[In-content Ad]]