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To use Apple Pay and Google Pay in the MyUTHealth mobile app, the app must be updated to version 9.8 or higher. Apple Pay requires an iOS 13+ device.

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To use Apple Pay and Google Pay on the MyUTHealth.org, patients must be using a supported web browser and device. Going forward, when patients look at their past payments in MyUTHealth, they can see which payments were made with Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Some of the most common types of congenital conditions include anorectal malformations, where the anus and rectum do not develop properly, and Hirschsprung’s disease, where the colon and rectum are missing nerve cells.

“While these conditions are colorectal in nature, they can also cause issues with several other organ, skeletal, and muscular systems in the body. In forming this group, we wanted to make sure we included doctors from many other disciplines to give these patients the most complete care possible,” said Akemi Kawaguchi, MD, associate professor of pediatric surgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, who initiated the idea for the program.

In addition to pediatric surgeons, the group also includes adult colorectal surgeons, urologists, gynecologists, and neurosurgeons.

“There is a deficit in care during this transitional period when young people need physical, social, and psychological support as they enter adulthood,” said Asha Bhalwal, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive services at McGovern Medical School. “That is why there is a need for this clinic as these patients are being transitioned from pediatric clinics to adult care.”

Kawaguchi, along with Linda Li, MD, assistant professor of pediatric surgery at the medical school, uses her background as a pediatric surgeon to consult on cases and provide input on the procedures done for these patients as children, specifically how those surgeries and corrections need to be handled when dealing with the adult patient.

“A lot of the surgeries done on children with colorectal disorders aren’t always taught to adult colorectal surgeons, so our background as pediatric surgeons allows us to provide knowledge and expertise related to how those organs now interact with each other in the adult patient based on what was done for them as a child,” Li said.

Being able to see patients in this type of setting has been a dream of Kawaguchi’s for a long time.

“We started talking about this concept in 2019, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought things to a standstill,” said Hajar Ayoub, MD, assistant professor of surgery and a urologist in the group. “It is nice to have this group finally be able to start seeing patients and providing them with the care they need.”

John Caridi, MD, associate professor of neurosurgery, explained that some procedures done for these patients, such as the cutting of a ligament of the spine to correct a tethered spinal cord, are fairly straightforward and simple, while others, such as surgically correcting scoliosis, can be much more complex.

These procedures can also be complicated by the other surgeries the patient has undergone previously to correct problems with their congenital condition. “If there is significant scarring or if the patient has had numerous surgeries to that area already, we may decide to utilize a different technique,” Caridi said. “It is definitely helpful to have the surgeons who did the previous surgery readily available, particularly since they have already been there and know how things looked to begin with. Communication among the surgeons is key.

The group not only provides surgical intervention and reconstruction for these patients when needed, but also provides non-operative management of incontinence, menstrual cycles, and fertility. Hajar Ayoub offers Botox injections and neuromodulation as a treatment option for issues related to the bladder and Bhalwal helps patients decide which contraceptive option might be best for them.

Bhalwal stressed the importance of seeing patients in a setting like this as one of the best ways to make sure they are getting the comprehensive care they need. “You can’t serve these patients effectively unless you get all of the doctors they might need to see together in one place,” she said.

Marianne Cusick, MD, assistant professor of surgery and colorectal surgeon in the group, agrees with Bhalwal. “This is the way medicine should be practiced,” she said.

Cusick, along with Amit Agarwal, MD, assistant professor of surgery and colorectal surgeon, are able to provide perspective on the colorectal issues these adults face such as screening for colon cancer, treatment for diarrhea and constipation, and treatment of fecal incontinence.

“When these patients come to see us, we can really give them a picture of what they can expect during adulthood based on the treatments they received as kids and how we can help them with anything that might come up,” Agarwal said.

Kawaguchi stressed the importance of these patients finding doctors who can provide relief and guidance for treatment options as they live with their conditions into adulthood. “If they don’t get plugged in with the right physicians, they just live with their symptoms. We want to be able to help them not just live with their condition, but thrive,” she said.

The group meets on a quarterly basis and hopes to increase its frequency in the future.

“So far our patients have been incredibly grateful. They think they are the only one in the world with their particular condition and when they come to see us, they realize they aren’t alone,” Kawaguchi said.

The group is located within the UT Physicians Pediatric Surgery – Texas Medical Center clinic. UT Physicians is the faculty practice of McGovern Medical School. To contact these specialists, call 832-325-7234 and ask to speak with someone with the Complex Congenital Colorectal Program.

Moving to Epic on May 8 benefits patients by providing a complete digital record spanning their entire continuum of care. With many health care entities using Epic, information sharing to access in-depth medical records for patients strengthens our ability to provide continuity of care and our resolve to improve outcomes. The EHR also comes with a robust, secure patient portal digital tool called MyChart, which is branded as MyUTHealth by the university.

“The transition to Epic will streamline services such as scheduling, result notifications, billing, referrals, and population health initiatives. Our goal is to work to migrate all university services involved in medical records initiatives to the Epic platform over the next couple of years,” explained Babatope Fatuyi, MD, chief medical information officer for UTHealth. “The benefits of this comprehensive system will be shared by physicians, staff, and our patients.”

As vice dean of clinical technology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, Martin J. Citardi, MD, professor and chair in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, says “The launch of Epic gives us a state-of-the-art system for managing the complex flow of medical information, upon which our clinicians depend in the care of our patients. Our MyUTHealth app will also offer the patients better access to their personal information, plus the opportunity to share information with their care team. Importantly, Epic has been configured to support our triple mission of care delivery, education, and research.”

This transition to Epic will allow staff to improve workflows, strengthen collaborations, and dedicate more time to direct patient care.

As part of the transition to Epic, UT Physicians, the clinical practice of McGovern Medical School, UTHealth Harris County Psychiatric Center, and the clinical practice of Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth, UT Health Services, will all migrate to the new EHR system on May 8. In February 2022, UTHealth Neurosciences will make the transition as well.

To learn more about the new MyUTHealth patient portal, go here.

Recognizing the need to improve the efficiency of health care visits during the pandemic, UT Physicians has announced digital, contactless coronavirus screening in our clinics throughout the Greater Houston area.

“While the health and safety of our patients remain our No. 1 priority, we recognize the additional screening and safety precautions can be a bit cumbersome when arriving at our clinics,” said Sahar Qashqai, executive director of UT Physicians Healthcare Transformation Initiatives. “We are thrilled to introduce the digital version of the COVID-19 screening questions that patients may take up to 24 hours before their appointment. We are hopeful that this will alleviate some of the stress for patients and improve the efficiency of health care visits.”

Patients will be encouraged to fill out the assessment before their appointments. They can do so by downloading the free UT Physicians app, available for both Apple and Android devices. The screening questions, available in both English and Spanish, take only a few minutes. Patients are asked about any symptoms they may be experiencing and if they have been tested for coronavirus in the last 14 days.

Upon arrival, patients can simply show they passed by displaying the green light that will appear on their mobile device screen or via an email sent directly to their inbox.

If patients miss the opportunity to take the screening before their appointments, UT Physicians will have posters in each of their clinic entrances with QR codes. Once scanned with their mobile device, they will be taken directly to the questionnaire to complete onsite.

For more information on how UT Physicians is protecting our patients during the pandemic, visit our coronavirus information center.

“I decided to become a physician early on in my childhood because of my father. He practices internal medicine,” said Au, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatric Surgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. “Hearing him talk about the way he helped patients shaped my childhood and desire to pursue medicine.”

After high school, Au was accepted into a competitive six-year combined BS/MD program at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. During that time, he decided to specialize in pediatric urology.

“I initially chose my specialty because there is a huge reconstruction component that appealed to me. Now that I am a father of two boys, it is more personal. I love children and I want to help them,” said Au.

When asked what he loves most about his job, Au believes it’s a combination of helping empower parents in the process of getting their children healthy and seeing positive results after medical or surgical therapy.

After working in pediatric urology for years, Au developed his passion of helping children with spina bifida. Spina bifida is a birth defect that occurs when a baby’s spinal cord does not develop properly, and results in the spinal cord being exposed. This typically leads to neurogenic bladder issues and a predisposition to kidney disease.

Traditionally, urological surgery for spina bifida has been done in an open fashion, but over the last decade minimally invasive techniques have been adopted.

“There is a benefit to robotic complex urological reconstruction in patients with spina bifida. Typically, this technique helps them to recover quicker and have a shorter hospital stay,” said Au.

Spearheading the effort to provide well-rounded care for those with spina bifida, Au and other UT Physicians providers will come together to help staff a multidisciplinary spina bifida clinic.

Stay tuned for more information on the upcoming clinic and its opening.

The research was recently published in The IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging Journal, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

The precise imaging through CTOT, pronounced “see tot,” helps physicians accurately diagnose the severity of a baby’s brain injury and identify ideal treatment to optimize quality of life throughout childhood.

Disorders such as cerebral palsy, a birth-related stroke, and epilepsy affect an infant’s brain development. In the U.S., around 10,000 babies are born each year with cerebral palsy, and about 470,000 children have epilepsy, a seizure disorder. Currently there is no way to accurately capture brain activity to quantify the severity of these conditions without putting the infants to sleep for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET), since both require being still.

“Imaging helps us understand what parts of the brain are not functioning normally, which is critical for locating a seizure focus in epilepsy and understanding brain dysfunction after stroke, among other neurological diseases,” said Manish N. Shah, MD, assistant professor in the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and pediatric neurosurgeon with UT Physicians and UTHealth Neurosciences. “MRI and PET scanning are both expensive, housed in other areas of the hospital, and require anesthesia for small children, so we had to find a new way to get the kind of functional brain mapping we needed.” Shah is also the director of pediatric spasticity and epilepsy surgery at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital.

To create the cap that babies can wear bedside while in the caregiver’s arms, Shah teamed up with Banghe Zhu, PhD, assistant professor with the Center for Molecular Imaging and Eva Sevick, PhD, professor and director of the center at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases at McGovern Medical School. The first-generation device captures the imaging in minutes, and subsequent designs should allow for imaging in seconds.

“The cap is put on the child and harmless near-infrared light is passed through from one side and collected on the other side of the cap. Using a sensitive detector system, we can use the collected light to rebuild a 3D high-resolution picture of brain activity,” Shah said. “When we know what part of the brain is not functioning, we can either remove it, like in epilepsy; or stimulate it, like in epilepsy, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, or depression, etc. Better diagnosis yields more precise treatment and an improved outcome for the patient.”

Shah took the idea of an imaging cap to Sevick and Zhu at the Center for Molecular Imaging.

“We needed to find a way to detect very weakly transmitted near-infrared light and avoid interference. To overcome this, we adapted a ‘night-vision goggle’ technology,” said Zhu, the lead biomedical optical engineer on the project.

The laser light is harmless for the baby – the light is dimmer than the laser diodes used in a grocery store scanner, said Sevick, who oversaw the project that incorporated some of her already-developed technology.

“The military uses night goggles to detect the near-infrared heat signatures. Zhu is using the same night goggle technology to detect dim, near-infrared light transmitted across the brain of newborns. From the collected light, Zhu then uses a mathematical algorithm to determine a map of light-absorbing hemoglobin levels, which can provide clinical information of brain injury,” said Sevick, the Nancy and Rich Kinder Distinguished Chair in Cardiovascular Disease Research at McGovern Medical School. “No one has ever before been able to create an optical device that is sensitive enough for quickly imaging across the brain.”

It took about three years of developing prototypes, trial and error, and close communication between the physician and scientists for the cap to achieve precise whole-brain imaging in a clinical setting.

“I had never worked on a project from bench to bedside, so this is really a unique project for me,” Zhu said.

“It’s really rare for ideas to go from the bench to the bedside so quickly and successfully as our team executed,” Sevick said. “Success takes a special clinician to be patient with the ‘quirks’ of the engineers while maintaining the primary focus on clinical care. Our engineering team also listened carefully to the clinicians and worked in partnership with them to yield this exciting outcome.”

Because the device can be worn while awake and active, it opens the door for researchers and physicians to revolutionize diagnosis and treatment for movement disorders like cerebral palsy.

“The next step is to make an even higher resolution device and continue collecting data from children with strokes and epilepsy to better understand the diseases,” Shah said.

The project was funded by grants from the Memorial Hermann Foundation and a Men of Distinction award to Shah for excellence in community achievement.

We understand the impact COVID-19 is having on our community and have witnessed its challenges firsthand. As a result, UT Physicians is committed to taking care of what’s most important to us, you – our patients.

“This is a difficult and stressful time. We understand many people are losing their jobs, which oftentimes includes their access to health insurance,” said Andrew Casas, chief operating officer of UT Physicians and senior vice president of UTHealth. “We want our patients to know that we are here for them, regardless of their situation. Please do not put off caring for yourself because you are struggling with the ability to pay. We are committed to working with all of our patients on a path forward.”

UT Physicians does not wish to see any of its current or future patients have to make these difficult decisions and will work with individuals to make sure their health remains a priority. We will be flexible and work with you to create individualized payment options that work for you.

We also recognize that scheduling medical appointments can be somewhat challenging with shifts in regular routines. As such, all community-based clinics will transition to extended hours, including evenings and Saturday appointments.

“We are all feeling the effects of this pandemic in some way. Right now, it’s important to be looking out for one another in any way possible. Offering extended hours and providing a variety of affordable payment options are just two ways UT Physicians can extend a helping hand during this crisis,” said Casas. “That is when true care becomes exceptional care. We are here for you.”

If you are in need of financial assistance to pay for your health care, please email financialassistance@utphysicians.com.

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Of Nguyen’s two loves, music and medicine, music came first. Growing up, choir was his first introduction to the art, but it was his love of ‘90s grunge that kick started his music career. “I picked up a guitar after watching Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins,” said Nguyen.

Drawing on inspiration from the wonderfully angsty grunge bands of the nineties, Nguyen’s first garage band was formed at just 15 years old. By age 17, their first record was released.

However, it wasn’t until Los Angeles and his plastic surgery training that he would meet the men that would come together to form Help The Doctor.

During his residency at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Nguyen and three other surgeons in training (Dr. Jason Roostaeian, Dr. Robert Kang, and Dr. Solomon Poyourow) bonded together over their shared love of rock music. Even with their hectic schedules and long hours, the group still found time to practice. “If it’s a labor of love, it’s pretty easy to do,” said Nguyen. “Similarly, I would say I now have one of the best jobs in the world where you get to work with kids and you have a skillset that can help them. It’s also a labor of love. It doesn’t feel like work.”

Their debut night as an official band was at the renowned Troubadour club in West Hollywood. Tickets were sold out, impressive and unusual for a new group’s first gig. Things escalated from that night. Soon, Help The Doctor was selling out multiple venues and produced an album titled “Angeles.”

All proceeds from their shows go to charity, specifically reconstructive surgery missions, like the one Nguyen takes every year to Vietnam.

Being a first-generation Vietnamese American, Nguyen’s annual mission trips to Vietnam hold a special place in his heart. In 2004, he visited as a medical student assisting with reconstructive surgeries. “That was my first time back to Vietnam, first time back to my country. It was a lot of mixed emotions,” said Nguyen.

With music as a passion and medicine as a career, Nguyen uses both to give back to the people in the two countries that he calls home.

“This is the second annual Wonderkids Workshop that I have organized in honor of Cleft-Craniofacial Awareness Month in July. We realize that many kids have never seen another child with a craniofacial difference, and we thought this one-day workshop on our campus is a perfect time to get them together,” said Leanne Doringo, MSN, RN, and clinical care coordinator with the Texas Cleft-Craniofacial team at UT Physicians.

The team facilitated this event in collaboration with Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, McGovern Medical School’s Office of Diversity and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). Participants had a busy day of activities, both fun and educational. They had the opportunity to tour a pediatric ambulance, view an anatomy lab, participate in interactive games, and talk with medical specialists.

Christian and Maiya have been attending events like this one for a couple years now and became friends at a craniofacial summer camp.

“I really like things like this because you get to meet your true friends,” said Maiya.

Christian, the oldest attendee at the event, says he thinks of himself as a mentor to the younger kids. “I try to make sure no one feels left out. I go around and talk to everyone.”

“These workshops have a positive impact on their attitude, provide the ability to cope with social struggles, and influence them in such a way that they can relate to others. I’ve noticed that each time these kids come back for more events, their friendships have become stronger. Some of them even ask their parents to hang out and exchange phone numbers – this tells me that these events are a great accomplishment,” said Doringo.

Along with highly trained medical personnel in general surgery, neurosurgery, plastic surgery, urology, and cardiovascular surgery, you can count on compassionate, specialized care that focuses on your child. Those specialists, who are also full-time faculty members at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, provide services to newborns through age 18. In some cases involving childhood birth defects, they even see adults.

Diane Harnden, who is the department management operator, said it has been a long time coming. “We are very excited to have the space. We are expanding rapidly and hiring more specialists. This is going to be a phenomenal space for patient care.”

Future of medicine

Matthew T. Harting, MD, says additional telemedicine rooms means a look ahead at the future of medicine. “We believe that is where care is going. We now have the opportunity to leverage technology to meet patients where they are, where care is both optimal and accessible. We have patients that come from many hours away for care. This technology allows us to meet them where they are. That is the future of medicine.”

“I love the clinic,” said Linda T. Li, MD. “It is bright and very functional. We are utilizing our space so much better. The large nursing station in the back of the clinic is a huge plus.”

On April 29, a ribbon cutting took place to officially open the remodeled clinic. The clinic is located at 6410 Fannin Street, Suite 950.

Hear from Kevin P. Lally, MD, chair of the Department of Surgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and Rose Samaniego, senior practice manager for the clinic, as we go inside the ribbon cutting and take a virtual tour of the new space.