Ingram's October 2023

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JARED SMITH Centerpoint Medical Center

KEENAN BERGHOFF North Kansas City Hospital/Meritas Health

A metropolitan area can, at times, be more like a small town when you’re a physician in a crisis situa tion. Just ask Jared Smith, a surgeon who was still in his first year back in Kansas City and stepped up to as sist a group of doctors and surgeons. The patient was a woman in shock because of an uncontrolled pelvic hemorrhage. The team was able to stop the bleeding, and then … “After the procedure, I realized she was a family friend,” Smith recalls. “As years have gone by, I have come to realize more what it means to serve my community because it seems that we are all either friends, neighbors, or interconnected in some not-too distant way. That is why I do what I do.” He does that at

For Keenan Berghoff, science is the solution, and it’s a big reason why the focus of his work as a physician is restoring lives through bariatric surgery. Early in his surgical career, he had a chance to observe the emerging treatment. “I saw the results, then I went back and learned the science behind it,” he says. “I got exposed to it, did it, and enjoyed it. There is science that says this makes sense. That, coupled with the

fact that in surgery, you often see a patient once but don’t see them again—they move on. With weight loss, you see them reg ularly in perpetuity, essentially. So the science was interesting, the outcomes were great, and people say that their life has changed forever because of it.” He’s a native of Fort Wayne, Ind., who went to Indiana Uni versity for both undergrad work and medical school, though that path didn’t start with a commit

Centerpoint Medical Center in Independence, which CEO Bret Kolman says has one of the busiest trauma centers in the region, often receiv ing patients from out of the area and even out of state through Life Flight Helicop ters. In those critical times, he says, Smith’s “exceptional dedication, unparalleled sur gical skills, passionate com- mitment to both patient care and medical advancements

ment to medicine. “In residency, you’re officially a doctor, but you don’t know yet how to practice what you want to practice,” he says. His medical rotations confirmed surgery as the right path, and then, over his five years in residency through UMKC, working at both Saint Luke’s and Truman medical centers, he found validation. Surgery was the right choice, he says, “be cause I did know that I wanted to be in a hospital rather than an office.” And surgery simply had more appeal than obstet rics, cardiology, or other specialties. “I couldn’t find one I en joyed more, and I was eliminating the possibilities one by one. I told myself, ‘Hey, you, make sure there’s not something else out there.’ Roughly 90 percent of his work is in the bariatric/ weight loss realm, a practice that has become increasingly popular as the nation has developed a self-inflicted obesity epidemic. “The field of surgery, particularly bariatric, has be come much safer year after year over the course of decades,” says Berghoff, who established that practice at NKCH. “A lot of that has to do with doing it with minimally invasive procedures rather than through a big open incision. The risks are less, the recovery is quicker, and the dividends are all better. Innovative instruments, high-resolution cameras, staplers, energy devic es, and other tools have all contributed to that improved safety record, he says, “to the point where numbers in the complica tion rate are exceedingly low now. In fact, it’s more harmful to a patient not to have surgery if they are obese with health problems than to have surgery. Patients with those conditions will die 10 times more frequently from those conditions than they would if they had the surgery.” Generally speaking, he says, the awareness is better among physicians and patients alike as bariatric has become the gold standard of therapy for treating obesity. “We’re getting patients sooner from their doc tors; they realize this is a dangerous deal,” Berghoff says.

set him apart as a remarkable physician.” Smith was just 12 years old, living in Columbia and delivering newspapers one day when he came upon a crash site where he saw police pull a man out of a wrecked car. “I wished I could help and wished I had the ability to take care of that man when he got to the hospital,” he remembers. That was the seed. The flowering came several years later when a surgeon—the father of a friend from his high school football days—invited him to watch an operation. “It was then,” he said, “that I knew I wanted to be a doctor.” Following his residency in Colorado, he and his wife jumped at the chance to come back home in 2008. Since then, he’s been witness to a wave of technical changes in surgery, especially with the Da Vinci robotic system. He says it “has al lowed me to perform procedures with tiny incisions, but with the visualization and exposure that one can achieve with open surgery, and in some cases, with bet ter visualization and exposure.” In some cases, as with various hernias, “the quality of the procedure exceeds that of the open procedure.” It’s been exciting to be a part of that, Smith says, but the real excitement in his field may just be getting started. “I anticipate that in the future, artificial intelligence may play a role in surgical procedures in some fashion as innovation continues,” he says.

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