Meet the Expert!
“I’m sharing my twenty plus years of knowledge and experience to patients so they
can be empowered to seek out and obtain the quality care they deserve.”
Dr. Scott Lee
Why Create the AFib Education Center?
Dr Lee created the AFib Education Center because after practicing his specialty and seeing patients for over twenty years, he became concerned about the general lack of education and information being given. The field of cardiac electrophysiology is a very specialized area in cardiology that is not fully understood even by other general cardiologists. When patients develop a heart rhythm disorder they are often scared that it might be life threatening and are wanting information and comprehensive treatment options. When they don’t properly understand what is going on they inevitably draw their own conclusions which may not be
accurate, and this increases their uncertainty and fear.
Unfortunately, Dr. Lee repeatedly saw patients who had received little or no explanations for their medical conditions, and sometimes even after ten or twenty years, still didn’t understand their heart rhythm problem or the function of their pacemaker or defibrillator implant. He also saw patients not being given full treatment options or a referral to an electrical heart specialist because their main cardiologist either didn’t understand what could now be treated effectively in this area, or they didn’t believe in it because they were practicing old medicine or had in the past referred to electrophysiologists who rushed through procedures and produced mediocre to poor results. Then there were the patients he saw who had been bullied into a procedure that may
not have been necessary or would have been their second choice if they had been given full explanations and all possible treatment options.
Over the years Dr. Lee has seen these trends only increase as physician reimbursements continue to be cut, insurances look for reasons not to pay doctors, and physician incomes either decrease or hold steady but don’t keep up with inflation. The result has been many physicians influenced to see more and more patients, spend less time with patients, and do as many procedures as possible as quickly as possible with the ever decreasing quality an inevitable byproduct. He has also seen this directly translate into the standard of care where for example, the typical result these days for ablation of more advanced stages of Afib has become multiple quick but largely ineffective procedures in order to bill insurances, an antiarrhythmic medication to try to suppress the remaining arrhythmia, then an explanation that that is the best that can be done which isn’t true.
As it becomes ever harder for doctors to practice medicine ethically and spend the time with patients that they deserve, Dr. Lee believes that the burden of responsibility for quality care has by necessity shifted more and more to patients and their families. He strongly believes that patients need to educate themselves about their medical conditions in order to navigate the process effectively and obtain the best care for themselves and their loved ones. He started the AFib Education Center website in order to share his twenty plus years of knowledge and experience to patients so they can be empowered to seek out and obtain the quality care they
deserve.
About Dr. Lee
Dr. Lee is a native of California and was born and raised in Sacramento. He went to college at the University of California at Berkeley and graduated with a degree in Biophysics. He then attended Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Afterwards he did his Internal Medicine Residency at the UCLA-VA West Los Angeles Medical Center. He completed his Cardiology Fellowship at the University of California Davis Medical Center and his Cardiac Electrophysiology Fellowship at Stanford University.
For the first ten years of his career he was the lone Electrophysiologist for a single specialty Cardiology practice with fifteen Cardiologists located north of San Francisco. There he started an Electrophysiology Program at the local hospital from scratch and trained all the staff. He then left to become Director of Electrophysiology at a regional Healthcare system in Jacksonville, FL that employed thirty-five Cardiologists and four Electrophysiologists to service five hospitals. While there he engaged in numerous national and international research trials. Along with his partner, Dr. Ven Sagi, he implanted the first Leadless Pacemakers in all of Florida, and he placed the first MRI-safe Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator (ICD) in north Florida. After establishing and growing the Electrophysiology program, he reentered private practice and is currently practicing in Tampa, FL.