Photograph by Ackerman + Gruber
Dr. Mohamed Hassan
Dr. Mohamed Hassan
It’s no secret that the Twin Cities is a hot bed of medical innovation and top-notch care.Some of the most remarkable advances, cutting-edge procedures, and patient-centric care models are being cultivated right in our own backyard. While the talent behind all this is both homegrown and from far afield, these doctors all share a love for the opportunities our engaged medical community provides.In the following pages, meet six of the more than 800 Top Doctors who made the list this year. Find out what’s happening in their world and learn a little about what makes them tick.
See the complete list of doctors selected to this year's Top Doctors.
Dr. Mohamed Hassan
Specialty: Hepatology and transplant hepatology (diseases of the liver and liver transplantation) and gastroenterology (endoscopy and colonoscopy). Associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Has practiced in East Africa, Italy, and the U.S.
Clinic: University of Minnesota Health, HealthPartners Specialty Center, and Minnesota Endoscopy Center
Years Practicing Medicine: 30-plus
Tell us about the cutting-edge work that is being done in your field today. Hepatitis C was described for the first time, at least components of it, in 1989. Now you can treat hepatitis C more than 95 percent of the time. So, within the short period I have been practicing medicine, hepatitis C was identified and now we can treat it easily with safe medications. Hepatitis C is the number-one reason for liver transplants in the United States. It’s not a trivial thing.
Are there fewer liver transplants as a result? It is expected to go down. But you won’t feel the effect immediately. I think we will probably reevaluate the effect in the near future to see that it drops below the other diseases, like nonalcoholic fatty liver or NASH (nonalcoholic steatohepatitis). You can have fat in the liver for two reasons: one is alcohol and the other is non alcohol-related fatty liver, especially in people who have risk factors such as high cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity. Within the coming years, nonalcoholic fatty liver will surpass hepatitis C as the main indication for liver transplants.
How successful are liver transplants these days? Liver transplantation is no longer an experimental treatment. It works, and it lasts a long time. People who got one in the 1980s or 1990s are still alive. We used to have problems with viral hepatitis C and B because the virus could return to the transplanted liver. Now we have suppressive medications for hepatitis B and curative medications for hepatitis C that will prevent organ loss due to the recurrence of the disease. So these people live as long as anybody else.
How do you enjoy life in the Twin Cities? I’ve been married for 31 years. We have three children: two boys and a girl. I’m originally from Somalia. I’ve been in a lot of countries but I really like the U.S.—you can go forward more easily than in other countries, especially if you have the right attitude and the right education. I was lucky to have been a doctor when I came here. That made things easier for me. I like Minnesota. The people are very helpful, polite, friendly.
What are you currently listening to? I love Italian songs. When I’m doing procedures, like colonoscopies, they say, “Hassan! Will you put on your music?” I love the blues, from B.B. King to Muddy Waters, and have a lot of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. But the majority of my music is Italian. I love it. It’s melodic.
Tell us a fun fact about you. I say things and the fellow shave put them on the wall— “Sayings from Dr. Hassan.” Every time I say something that’s peculiar to them, they write it down. They’ve made this list,and it’s hundreds of things.
Dr. Nancy Mendelsohn
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Dr. Nancy Mendelsohn
Specialty: Clinical geneticist—practicing clinical genetics and genomics—for children who have potentially inherited disorders, multiple birth defects, neurocognitive decline.
Hospital: Chief of specialty care at Children’s Minnesota
Years practicing medicine: 30
What innovative work is happening in your field? Pharmacogenomics is looking at a set of genes and understanding the variance in the genes and how that may help direct the safe medication choice for certain populations of patients. It can help us know which medications might be toxic if you give too much of them. It helps you know who is a fast metabolizer or a slow metabolizer. It’s particularly important for children who have cancer disorders and for our patients who have neuropsychological problems—it can help direct which medicines to choose, which groups of medicines.
What else is just around the corner? The ability to do rapid exome and genome sequencing. It’s not mainstream, but we’re involved in a project to try to show the efficacy of it—clinically and financially—so that we can provide it for our patients. Your DNA is made up of introns and exons. All your exons together make up your exome. Exome sequencing has changed our ability to make a diagnosis from about 16 to 20 percent in children to maybe 30 to 40 percent of children with either rare disorders or cognitive impairment or something when we don’t know what’s wrong. When you layer on whole genome sequencing—which is the exons plus the introns—then we can get to about 50 percent. We’re just beginning to look at the possible ability to do genome sequencing in our sickest children and in our NICU.
What kind of diseases can this help diagnose? We’d use it with newborns with bad epilepsy or with liver disease. Children that are born and we don’t know what’s wrong—why they’re struggling, why they’re having problems. But it’s a very expensive methodology, and trying to figure out which patients to do it [on] is hard.
What made you choose genetics? I always liked it. I remember being in grade school and reading about the different blood groups. But when I was in medical school, my niece was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder. It was life-changing to watch my brother lose a child to a rare disorder. I think that’s what ultimately encouraged me to go that way.
What’s your life like outside of medicine? I’m married to a man I’ve known my whole life. We have two grown children. We love being outside and gardening. My favorite pastime is cooking. I’m not artistically talented— I can’t draw a circle, I can’t decorate, I can’t do anything—but I can cook.
Dr. Mary Miley
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Dr. Mary Miley
Specialty: General internal and preventative medicine for patients 18 and older. Cares for patients with heart and lung complications, high blood pressure, and history of stroke.
Clinic: Park Nicollet, Plymouth
Years practicing medicine: 26
Tell us about exciting changes in your field. We do Health Care Home at Park Nicollet Clinic [all 20 PNC locations are MDH-certified as Health Care Homes], and we were one of the first groups to do it early on. We take care of patients—especially ones with complicated needs—as a team that can include a physician, an RN, a home nurse, a pharmacist, and a care coordinator. As a group, the Health Care Home team works with patients and their families to figure out their needs, liaison with community resources, and improve their care and health. It’s something that’s been great for the patients and great for me because I can do more with other people’s expertise—and everybody is on the same page. We are also working on telemedicine-related things. HealthPartners and Park Nicollet are going to try to do some care in a home setting for people with congestive heart issues, who might have traditionally been admitted to the hospital.
How does a Health Care Home visit work? A patient sees me as their primary physician and we have a care coordinator who’s embedded in the clinic, so if somebody has a need for an increased explanation of things or maybe to work on their diabetes in a more concentrated way, then the care coordinator can see them also. If a patient needs social services or something that’s out there in the community, the coordinator can see them in conjunction with me. It helps expand the ability for patients to get better care. In the traditional model, the doc would be working to try to make things happen and wouldn’t realize there were certain things going on in the patient’s home structure—or there were financial needs or other things—that created barriers to care.
What do you do in your downtime? There’s so much to do in the Twin Cities—great parks and great places to walk, hike, and bike. I like to sea kayak and canoe up north and spend time in Grand Marais.
Do you have a hidden talent? If you give me a karaoke microphone, I can rock a pretty wicked “Proud Mary.”
Dr. B.J. (Brenda Jo) Harris
Photograph by Ackerman + Gruber
Dr. Brenda Jo Harris
Specialty: Obstetrics and gynecology, with special interest in gynecologic surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and urogynecology (a combination of female urologic issues and gynecology, such as pelvic floor relaxation, pelvic floor issues, and prolapsed urinary incontinence).
Clinic: Women’s Health Consultants, Abbott Northwestern, WestHealth, and Pelvic Floor Center
Years practicing medicine: 18
What innovative work is being done in your field today? Some of the combo surgeries I do are truly life-changing for women. I’ve been operating with a robot for a decade now. But being able to consistently do those combinations—sacrocolpopexy (big vaginal prolapse surgery) with rectopexy (big rectal prolapse surgery)—in a minimally invasive way with a robot is relatively new in the Twin Cities.
How is this making a difference? There is a whole subset of women who are not living as active a lifestyle as they could. These are women with a lot of life experience who could help us be more successful in our generation and the generations below us. When we keep these women vital, that’s not a small thing for all of us. Most of these surgeries are for women in their 50s to 80s. It also can certainly happen right after childbirth. The recovery is light years ahead of what it used to be when I used to make big incisions. It used to be a good six to eight weeks, and it used to be four days in the hospital. Now most people go home the next day, and you need about a month off work. And the risk of blood loss, blood clots, and infection is less when it’s minimally invasive.
What are other notable advances? Although it’s not new, Botox injections for overactive bladder are becoming more widely used for people who have recalcitrant urgency, frequency, and leaking. I think in terms of what can we do to prevent this. There’s this big push nationwide for [fewer] C-sections. But we need to pick our battles and find some common sense in that. I think the older women are when they start having their babies, the less forgiving their pelvic floor is going to be. There is some [early-stage] research being done on IV injections of stem cells after childbirth that shows some hope and may be preventative for future pelvic floor disorders.
What’s your life like outside of medicine? My husband and I have two terrific teenage daughters, so I spend my share of time sitting at track meets or soccer games.
Share a fun fact about you. I’m trying to teach my 100-pound dog, Trip, to ride in the canoe with me. He’s a combo Rhodesian ridgeback/bloodhound and my gentle giant. So far, we’re working on shore—getting in and hanging out. We’ll work our way to the water.
Dr. Anupam B. Kharbanda
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Dr. Anupam B. Kharbanda
Specialty: Emergency medicine, pediatrics
Clinic: Chief of critical care and pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Children’s Minnesota in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and a few satellite locations
Years practicing medicine: 12
How is your area of expertise evolving? In pediatric emergency medicine, we provide pediatric-specific care to children who have acute conditions as well as push the frontier in providing better care to those kids. So, for me, that’s been developing clinical algorithms. How do you determine an element of risk for a child who comes into our emergency department, and, based on that risk, how do you determine your next path forward? It’s called risk modeling or risk stratification, and I’ve done that for pediatric appendicitis. So if someone comes into our emergency department now—based on what they tell our triage nurse, their vital signs, what they tell the doctor—we can use complex algorithms to say this is your risk for appendicitis and then take the next step.
What are some added benefits for this? We’re more judicious in our use of diagnostic imaging like CT scans. In pediatrics, CT has become a major issue because of the risk of radiation and long-term risk of cancer associated with it. These algorithms allow us to target which patients don’t need imaging, which patients are better served with ultrasound, and which ones need CT scans. They’ve allowed us to cut CT rates by over 50 percent in the past three years.
Other promising work in your field right now? One of the major reasons families come into our emergency department is for children with fever. Oftentimes it’s difficult to figure out if it’s due to an ear infection, pneumonia, an infection in the blood, or more of a benign virus. There have been several innovative studies over the past couple of years looking to identify which bacteria or viruses are growing in the bloodstream, using advanced genetic techniques. So in real time they’ve been able to take a child’s blood and run an analysis describing which viral or bacterial markers of an infection are present. Within the next several years, we hope to have a test we can use in the emergency department. The implications are we’d be more judicious in our use of antibiotics, follow-up, and who needs admission to the hospital.
Life outside medicine? My wife is a pediatrician at HealthPartners. We have two kids. I was born and raised in St. Paul, went out east for the rest of my training, was out in New York for about 10 years and loved it, but decided to come back. The Twin Cities is such a friendly, supportive environment, so accepting of different cultures and viewpoints. It was an area that I wanted to raise my children in.
Dr. Nancy Cummings
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Dr. Nancy Cummings
Specialty: Orthopedic sports medicine surgeon, specializing in the treatment—both surgical and nonsurgical—of athletic-related injuries. Orthopedic surgeon for the Minnesota Lynx, active individuals, and weekend warriors.
Clinic: Mayo Clinic Square, downtown Minneapolis; Mayo Clinic, Rochester
Years practicing medicine: 23
What exciting, cutting-edge work is being done in your field today? We’re beginning to understand the body’s ability to heal itself with our help. For instance, ligaments like an anterior cruciate ligament or ACL are now starting to be treated with a matrix, a biologic sponge infused with the patient’s cells to bridge the gap in a torn ACL. It’s in the very early stages of development but allows the patient to retain most of their natural ligament. Also, articular cartilage—which is the gliding surface of a joint—is very hard to heal because it doesn’t have a great blood supply. And now they’re developing a matrix again that can be populated with a patient’s own cartilage cells and then placed back in, say, a knee for an injury. It’s not an answer for something like arthritis. But if somebody knocks off a piece of cartilage, we are developing new ways to get that to heal.
How is this making a difference inpatients’ lives? The whole focus is turning toward joint preservation, so we’re trying to preserve the natural knee by replacing the cartilage. Total joint [replacements] are wonderful procedures but they were designed for folks with arthritis and later in life. Hopefully, we’ll be decreasing the incidents of arthritis down the line if we can address focal cartilage injuries.
How did your hip in jury in eighth grade affect you? I realized no matter how talented I was, I wasn’t going to be able to play basketball or sports beyond college, so I decided I’d rather keep other people active and do what my orthopedic surgeon did for me, which was to allow me to live an active lifestyle.
What do you do in your downtime? I love to fly-fish. I go down to the Rush River in Wisconsin and sometimes the Kinnickinnic. In Minnesota I go to Whitewater State Park.
Tell us a fun fact about you. I was the Connecticut State yo-yo champion when I was in middle school. I had been on crutches for the year because I had hip surgery, so yo-yoing was one of the things I could do. I haven’t kept up that skill, but I can still do a couple tricks.
See the complete roster of doctors selected to this year's Top Doctors.
The 21st edition of our Top Doctors list includes 803 doctors in 45 specialties. Here’s how we put it together:
When compiling a list that’s as relied upon as our annual Top Doctors list, research is essential. We asked physicians to nominate one or more doctors (excluding themselves) to whom they would go if they or a loved one were seeking medical care. From there, candidates were grouped into 45 specialties and evaluated on myriad factors, including (but not limited to) peer recognition, professional achievement, and disciplinary history. Doctors who had the highest scores from each grouping were invited to serve on a blue-ribbon panel that evaluated the other candidates. In the end, only doctors who acquired the highest total points from the surveys, research, and blue-ribbon panel review were selected as Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s 2017 Top Doctors.
Of course, no list is perfect. Many qualified doctors who are providing excellent care to their patients are not included on this year’s list. However, if you’re looking for exceptional physicians who have earned the confidence and high regard of their peers, you can start your search here (or search our medical guide). In addition to the list you find here, this year’s crop of Top Doctors will join a prestigious group of doctors from more than 20 cities around the country who have been selected to Super Doctors, the full list of which you can find at superdoctors.com.
Editor’s Note: Many of our Top Doctors have specialty certification recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. This board certification requires substantial additional training in a doctor’s area of practice. We encourage you to discuss this board certification with your doctor to determine its relevance to your medical needs. More information about board certification is available at abms.org. © 2017 MSP Communications. All rights reserved.
