Having surgery in a teaching hospital or “academic medical center” offers several advantages. We are uniquely focused on education, research and complex patient care. Our outcomes are scrutinized as we are held to the highest standards. Patients who value a high level of attention, innovation and thoroughness seek out this environment for care.

Expertise: Besides being expert surgeons, our doctors are leaders in their field in research and teaching, so we know the best of what’s out there. We frequently collaborate with experts across disciplines, ensuring comprehensive and personalized care. Our care is evidence-based and protocol-driven, which improves outcomes.

Access to cutting-edge treatments: We conduct research to offer innovative surgical techniques, advanced technology and clinical trials that may not yet be available elsewhere.

Team-based approach: Patients benefit from a team of health-care providers, including attending surgeons, residents, fellows and medical students, all working collaboratively. This ensures thorough oversight and multiple layers of care.

Focus on complex cases: We are often referred patients who have complex or rare conditions that may be beyond the scope of some hospitals or surgeons. We are able to work as teams to provide care to patients who may not otherwise be candidates for surgical treatment. Our extensive experience in managing these challenging cases results in excellent outcomes.

Teaching environment: The involvement of students, residents and fellows means patients have multiple layers of care and multiple team members watching over them. This leads to more attention to each patient. This teaching environment also ensures that procedures are approached with precision and multiple perspectives.

Comprehensive postoperative support: We are able to leverage the resources available at Johns Hopkins facilities to provide extensive support for follow-up care, including (if needed) rehabilitation services, specialized clinics and access to support programs tailored to patients' needs.

Overall, surgery in an academic environment offers a blend of expertise, innovation and comprehensive care that can lead to superior outcomes, particularly for complex or high-risk cases.

We offer surgical care in a variety of locations and care settings. Our most complex patients have surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in downtown Baltimore, where we can offer an array of complex and multidisciplinary services. We work in the Levi Watkins, Jr., M.D., Outpatient Center (part of the main Johns Hopkins campus) to provide care in a more efficient manner, but use all of the resources the hospital provides. We also offer expert endocrine surgery care at Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center in Columbia, Maryland. Finally, we operate in two Johns Hopkins ambulatory surgery centers — at Green Spring Station and in Howard County — to provide convenient, cost-effective, efficient and patient experience-centered outpatient care in state-of-the-art facilities outside of the hospital. In addition, we evaluate patients in clinic at Sibley Memorial Hospital.

All of our endocrine surgeons spent an additional one to two years after general surgery training in an endocrine surgery fellowship program, specifically to learn expert care for endocrine surgery patients. We bring expertise from the Cleveland Clinic, Georgetown University, Mayo Clinic, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of California, Los Angeles. We are all high-volume surgeons — that means we each perform more than 100 thyroid and parathyroid operations per year and more than 25 adrenalectomies per year. We not only have expertise in the operation: we also lead guideline development for the treatment of these problems, which helps individualize care.

Endocrine surgeons are experts in treating thyroid cancer. Most thyroid cancer cases do not spread throughout the body but can spread to lymph nodes in the neck. Evaluating the neck lymph nodes before surgery and taking out sections of suspicious or cancerous lymph nodes during surgery are part of what we do. With specific, complex cancer procedures, we will sometimes work with other expert surgeons to provide the care you need.