Surgical ConsultingPatient teaching decks: the talk you give forty times a year, in your pocket.
A teaching deck that assembles itself from the pages you already wrote, in two taps, for the patient in front of you. It runs in the office, at the bedside, in the emergency department, on an inpatient consult, and when a student asks you a question in the hallway. At the end the patient scans a code and takes that exact deck home.
DrCRodriguez.com now runs four talks: gallbladder, inguinal hernia, inguinal hernia in women, and umbilical hernia. The examples on this page use the gallbladder talk, the first one we built. The engine has nothing to do with gallbladders. It builds from whatever condition pages are on your site.
How a teaching deck is built: two taps at the bedside
You pick what this patient has. You pick how you are going to do the operation. You tick any step that applies to them. The deck opens. That is the whole interaction, and it is designed to happen while you are still standing.
What the three choices are is up to you. A breast practice might pick the subtype, then lumpectomy or mastectomy, then whether reconstruction is immediate or delayed. A plastic surgery practice might pick the procedure, then the approach, then whether drains or staging are involved. A spine practice might pick the level, the approach, and whether instrumentation is used. The demo below happens to be gallbladder disease. The hernia talks on DrCRodriguez.com use the same three steps with different choices: discuss both repairs, robotic only, or open only, and add real pictures for a femoral or obturator hernia.
What does this patient have?
How are you doing it?
Laparoscopic and open are switched off because Dr. Rodriguez plans every gallbladder operation robotically. Your deck offers the approaches you use.
Anything extra for this patient?
Pick a diagnosis to build a deck.
Open the deck ↗This demo drives the real engine on DrCRodriguez.com. Options that do not apply to the diagnosis you picked switch themselves off, because a deck that offers a C-tube for a gallbladder polyp is worse than no deck.
Why 104 talks come from one set of pages
The engine does not store 104 decks. It stores one set of slides the physician wrote, and assembles the right subset on demand. Here is the arithmetic, so the number is checkable rather than impressive.
| Diagnosis | Optional steps that apply | Combinations | Decks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acute cholecystitis | 7 | 48 without a C-tube, 4 with one | 52 |
| Biliary colic | 4 | 24 = 16 | 16 |
| Six remaining diagnoses | 3 each | 6 each | 36 |
| Total distinct decks, robotic approach | 104 | ||
Some steps rule others out. A gallbladder that may not come out whole already has its own drain slide, so "Will have a drain" switches off. A C-tube first means no operation today, so the surgical steps switch off. That is why six of the diagnoses give 6 decks instead of 8. The laparoscopic and open slides are still in the engine; turning both back on would give 312.
Count them yourself on the live picker. Add a ninth diagnosis and the number moves again, which is the point: the engine scales with your content, not with our drawing time. Run the same arithmetic on your own condition list and you will get your own number.
How the patient takes the exact deck home
The last slide carries a QR code for the deck that was just shown, with the same diagnosis, the same approach and the same extra steps still selected. The patient scans it before they stand up.
One of the 104: acute cholecystitis, robotic, with a duct x-ray during surgery. Scan it.
What that changes
- It survives the car ride. The deck is a web address, so it lives in their browser history rather than in a folder on the passenger seat.
- It travels. A patient forwards the link to the daughter who could not be at the appointment, and she sees the same talk, not a summary of it.
- It gets re-read. The questions that surface at nine that night have an answer that came from you.
- It teaches. The same link is a perfectly good five-minute lecture for a medical student or a junior resident.
What it never holds
The deck is built entirely from the address bar. There is no field anywhere in it that can take a name, a date of birth, or a record number, and nothing is saved. The only thing counted is how often a deck is opened, which diagnosis, which approach, which steps. No patient identity enters the system because the system has nowhere to put one.
Where a teaching deck gets used, in any specialty
The office
On the wall screen during the consultation, replacing the drawing on the paper towel.
The bedside
On the phone in your coat pocket, at the inpatient consult, for a family that arrived after rounds.
The emergency department
The three minutes you have with a family in a hallway, with a picture instead of a description.
Teaching
The impromptu student or resident talk, already sequenced, already correct, already yours.
At home
The scanned deck, re-read by the patient and by whoever they forward it to.
Pre-op phone calls
Your staff sends the link before the visit, so the patient arrives having seen it.
What a teaching deck engine costs
We are selling the engine, not slide labor. It is built once against your existing condition pages — whatever specialty those pages cover — and after that it grows as your site grows.
Deck engine setup
$1,500
- The picker, the slide engine, and the take-home QR
- Built from the condition pages on your site
- Your first condition family, wired end to end
- Installed on your own domain, under your own analytics
Requires an existing RC Surgical Consulting site, or a build running alongside it.
Maintenance
$195/month
- Two hours a month of deck work: new diagnoses, new steps, rewording, new artwork
- Added on top of your regular care plan, not instead of it
- Cancel any time
or
Hourly
- No retainer, billed against the published out-of-plan rate
- For a practice that expects to change the decks once or twice a year
Prices hold for 30 days from the date quoted. Texas sales tax applies where required.
Questions physicians ask about teaching decks
What is a patient teaching deck?
It is a short slide talk that assembles itself for one patient. You pick the diagnosis, the surgical approach, and any extra steps that apply to them, and the engine builds the matching sequence of slides from content you already wrote. It is designed to be driven in two taps while you are still standing, on an exam room screen or the phone in your coat pocket.
Do I have to make the slides?
No. We build the engine against the condition pages on your site, and the slides come from that material. We are selling the engine, not slide labor. If you want new diagnoses or new steps added later, that is what the monthly maintenance covers.
How can one talk have 104 versions?
Eight diagnoses, the robotic approach, and a set of optional steps that differs by diagnosis. Acute cholecystitis allows seven, which gives 52 decks once the steps that rule each other out are removed. Biliary colic allows four, giving 16. The remaining six diagnoses allow three each, giving 6 apiece, or 36. That totals 104. The laparoscopic and open slides are still in the engine and switched off; turning them back on would give 312. Adding a ninth diagnosis moves the number again.
Does the deck hold any patient information?
None. The deck is built entirely from the address bar. There is no field anywhere in it that can hold a name, a date of birth or a record number, and nothing is saved. The only thing counted is how often a deck is opened and which options were chosen.
What does a teaching deck engine cost?
$1,500 to set up, once, built against an existing RC Surgical Consulting site. After that, either $195 a month for two hours of deck work added to your care plan, or hourly billing with no retainer if you expect to change the decks once or twice a year.
Can I use it to teach students and residents?
Yes, and physicians do. The same link is a sequenced, correct five-minute talk on a single condition. It is one of the reasons only four pages on DrCRodriguez.com are read more than the teaching deck.
See the one that is already running.
DrCRodriguez.com/teach is live, in daily use, and only four pages on that site were read more over the last 93 days. Open it on your phone the way you would in a room.