Dr. Pannucci’s clinical interests include aesthetic surgery of the breast and body, breast reconstruction surgery, and general reconstructive surgery. He offers the full range of reconstructive techniques, including microsurgical free tissue transfer and perforator flaps (such as deep inferior epigastric perforator (DIEP) flap breast reconstruction). Dr. Pannucci is an experienced microvascular surgeon, and has performed hundreds of free flap procedures. He is also an accomplished surgeon educator and sought-after speaker for national meetings in plastic and microvascular surgery.

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Dr. Pannucci is a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the Washington Society of Plastic Surgeons, and the Northwest Society of Plastic Surgeons.  He also sits on the Editorial Board of the scientific journal Aesthetic Surgery Journal, is a former board member of the Aesthetic Society Education and Research Foundation, is the current Vice President of the Northwest Society of Plastic Surgeons, and locally sits on the physician credentialing committee for Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center.

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Education

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Dr. Pannucci is a Midwest native and received his Bachelor of Science degree from Indiana University and his Doctor of Medicine degree from Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Pannucci completed an integrated residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at the University of Michigan. While in Ann Arbor, he also received a Masters degree in Health and Healthcare Research. Dr. Pannucci subsequently completed a clinical fellowship in microvascular reconstruction at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining Plastic Surgery Northwest, Dr. Pannucci spent six years on faculty at the University of Utah, where he achieved the rank of Associate Professor with Award of Tenure.

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Patient Experience

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Dr. Pannucci has a thoughtful, kind, and straightforward bedside manner, and is proud to regularly receives “five star” reviews from patients via RealSelf, Google, and others.  Many of these are linked in the “Testimonials” section below.

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While on faculty at the University of Utah for six years, Dr. Pannucci was regularly ranked in the top 1% of providers for patient satisfaction and experience through Press-Ganey scores—a metric which is derived from patient experience surveys.

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Click here to review unedited comments from Dr. Pannucci’s University of Utah patients from 2014 to 2019.

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Surgical Mythbusting

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Dr. Pannucci has an extensive background in clinical trials and clinically oriented research, and has leveraged these skills for “Surgical Mythbusting”. Using a paradigm similar to the popular television show “Mythbusters”, Dr. Pannucci has identified intriguing questions for patients and surgeons alike—questions that are practical in nature, impact patient’s day-to-day care, and have no clear answer--and examined them using a rigorous framework. He has partnered with biomedical engineer Adam Cyr PhD and ballistics expert Martin Szegedi, PhD to show that breast implants can protect patients against penetrating trauma.  He recently published a seminal manuscript showing that breast implants can decrease force experienced by the chest wall in low speed car accidents, plausibly protecting women against rib fractures and other chest trauma. 

 

National Leader in Patient Safety

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Dr. Pannucci is a nationally recognized advocate for patient safety, particularly in the realm of venous thromboembolism (VTE). VTE encompasses deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolus, both of which are life or limb threatening complications of surgical procedures. Dr. Pannucci's research over the past fifteen years has worked to identify the optimal paradigm to identify and decrease VTE risk for surgical patients. Dr. Pannucci's research has been funded by national foundations as well as the federal government. He has previously been the Principal Investigator on 11 clinical trials which examined optimization of post-operative anti-coagulant drugs in surgical patients to minimize risks of VTE and microvascular thrombosis after free flap surgery. Dr. Pannucci has published over 100 manuscripts, the majority of which examine risk factors and prevention of venous thromboembolism in surgical patients, in the peer-reviewed medical literature. He recently published the second largest randomized controlled trial ever conducted in the field of plastic surgery

 

Click here to view all of Dr. Pannucci’s peer reviewed publications.

 

Dr. Pannucci is regularly an invited lecturer at national and international academic meetings. Dr. Pannucci is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on venous thromboembolism in plastic surgery patients. He regularly helps to establish specialty specific guidelines for VTE prevention--including participation in expert consensus panels through the American Heart Association and the American Association of Plastic Surgeons.

 

Dr. Pannucci’s research efforts have made a notable and important impact on patient safety for plastic surgery patients—an impact that has been recognized by his peers. Dr. Pannucci and his research collaborators have won multiple awards for their research. Most notably, they were recognized with the 2012 James Barrett Brown Award from the American Association of Plastic Surgeons. This annual award is given to the best paper in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery for the previous calendar year — view the article here. More recently, Dr. Pannucci was awarded the Best Research Paper published in 2019 from the Aesthetic Surgery Journal — the #1 ranked aesthetic surgery journal in the world—view the article here.

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Personal

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Dr. Pannucci lives in Spokane, Washington with his wife (who grew up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho) and two sons. Dr. Pannucci is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and is a Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine. He is a fan of anything outdoors, and in his free time can be found in the family tipi on the Spokane River, practicing his fly-casting (but not always catching fish), or skiing at Schweitzer Mountain.

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View Testimonials