As Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine was looking to expand its presence northward in the early 2010s, the team behind the Parris Castoro Eye Care Center, a well-established local ophthalmology practice with decades of experience in the Bel Air, Maryland, community, was thinking about their own next steps. Wayne Parris started the practice in 1975, and was joined six years later by Chuck Castoro. The duo decided it was time to find a partner for an acquisition.
“We knew that the prestige of Wilmer would continue to maintain a high standard of excellence,” Parris says.
Wilmer Eye Institute’s Bel Air office opened on April 12, 2012. The transition from a private practice to a Wilmer Eye Institute satellite facility brought a shift in philosophy, as academics came into the picture. “It’s a great achievement to have made such an enormous and monumental change in a practice from private to academic, and continue to not just survive, but really succeed,” says Lynne Young, Wilmer’s director of clinical operations, who helped oversee the acquisition. “It just went so well. I’m just so happy for the team and the group, and I’m grateful to be a part of it.”
Adrienne Scott, a retina specialist who joined Wilmer in 2008, was tapped to be the clinic’s first medical director — a position she still holds today. “She is smart, sharp, beloved by patients and very much involved in research,” says Young of Scott. “She is very much the reason for the success of that entire practice.”
Scott says the merger brought the best of both worlds to Bel Air. It combined the knowledgeable and experienced staff from Parris Castoro, as well as the efficiencies and prioritization of patient care from the private practice, with a larger pool of world-class surgeons and well-trained ophthalmologists from Johns Hopkins. As a result, the location carries on with excellence in clinical and surgical care, as well as in research. “I think it’s been a mutually beneficial joining of forces,” she says.
A decade later, the practice in Bel Air remains a reliable mainstay in the Harford County community and beyond. Many of the doctors and staff members who had worked at Parris Castoro — including the eponymous doctors — stayed on with Wilmer after the merger, and some remain at the satellite to this day. “The transition was smooth,” says Candie Grafton, Wilmer-Bel Air’s clinical supervisor. “Even though Bel Air joined Wilmer, our office still has a private practice intimacy that patients love.”
Grafton, who joined Parris Castoro in 1999 as a general clinic technician and has been the satellite’s clinical supervisor since 2016, is one of many familiar faces that patients have seen at both Parris Castoro and, today, at Wilmer. In addition to Grafton and Scott, technicians Cynthia Norris, Lenora Brown-Galloway, Denise Ricard, Linda Harding and Janet von Bank; doctors Stephen Cyford, O.D., Jeanette Bonsack, O.D., and Sandra Rozar, O.D.; surgical coordinators Wanda Bader and Susan Lassiter; and patient service coordinators Sharon Alaimo, Victoria Smith and Linda Smith have all been with Wilmer-Bel Air since the merger. “Those who work there are very knowledgeable, and they work hard,” says Wilmer budget specialist Shawn Walbrecher. “It’s a really good group of people who come together and really take the patients’ needs to heart and do the best to take care of them.”
Walbrecher started with Parris Castoro in 1986, when the practice opened its current location. A clinical coordinator at the time of the Wilmer acquisition, Walbrecher was the clinic’s manager from 2013–2021. She says it’s important for patients to have multispecialty eye care close to where they live. “The fact that Wilmer remains steady in the community as an ophthalmology practice that the community at large can depend on, I think that’s the best thing,” she says.
Bonsack, a doctor of optometry, also joined Parris Castoro in 1986. “I was happy to stay and participate in the high standard of care continued by Johns Hopkins,” she says. “There is always more to learn, and I am happy to be able to keep the patients I have been seeing for decades, as well as new ones.”
The practice at Bel Air continues to flourish. In addition to providing years of surgical care via its ambulatory surgery center, the Bel Air location is also home to Wilmer Optical services, which operated as usual during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many retail options were closed. New services, such as an aesthetics program under the direction of Emily Li, M.D., will specialize in cosmetic and reconstructive procedures designed to improve the appearance and function of the eyelids and face. “Wilmer-Bel Air continues to grow and, like fine wine, only gets better,” says Grafton.