Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Surgisphere" in English language version.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link){{cite journal}}: |last1= has generic name (help)Sapan Desai, MD, PhD, MBA is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Surgisphere Corporation, a medical education and healthcare data analytics company with hundreds of clients around the world. He has held multiple physician leadership roles in clinical practice, including serving as the Vice Chairman for Research at Southern Illinois University, Director of Quality at Memorial Medical Center, and Director of Performance Improvement at Northwest Community Hospital. Dr. Desai is a certified lean six sigma master black belt, and a certified professional in healthcare quality. He is the recipient of the international grand prize in healthcare quality by the International Hospital Federation in 2015.
Dr. Desai appears to be the founder of Surgisphere, which was formed in 2007. A PubMed search for "Sapan Desai" shows 39 medical publications in the last five years. With the exception of the two very recent COVID-19 papers, the Surgisphere database does not appear to have been used in any of the other 37 publications. Why would the founder of Surgisphere have access to one of the largest repositories of real-time patient data, but not use it until publishing on COVID-19? If we ignore the image of multiple shell corporations enshrouding a hastily organized Surgisphere Corporation and stick to analyzing the COVID-19 data from the Lancet study, the findings are even less reassuring.
{{cite journal}}: |last1= has generic name (help){{cite journal}}: |last1= has generic name (help)The experts who wrote The Lancet also criticized the study's methodology and the authors' refusal to identify any of the hospitals that contributed patient data, or to name the countries where they were located. The company that owns the database is Surgisphere, based in Chicago.
The University of Utah has "mutually agreed" to terminate the faculty appointment of Amit Patel, who was among the authors of two retracted papers on Covid-19 and who appears to have played a key role in involving a little-known company that has ignited a firestorm of controversy.
James Watson, a senior scientist at the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Thailand, says he has doubts that any research organization would have been able to obtain such detailed records for so many people in Africa so quickly. He outlined this and concerns about multiple other aspects of the study in the open letter, which includes 17 signatories based at institutions in Africa.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)