OB-GYN
Faculty
When JABSOM created a Professorship for Advanced Gynecologic Surgery last year, the goal was to bring specialized care to Hawaiʻi that many patients previously had to leave the state to receive.
Just months after arriving, Dr. Kimberly Kho is already making that vision a reality.
Kho joined JABSOM after building one of the nation’s leading programs in minimally invasive gynecologic surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Her work focuses on treating benign gynecologic diseases. These are non-cancerous conditions that affect millions of women, but they can still have life-altering consequences.
“These are benign diseases, meaning they’re not cancer,” Kho said. “But they can be completely debilitating.”
Conditions such as uterine fibroids and endometriosis affect a significant portion of the population. Fibroids alone occur in roughly 70 to 80 percent of women with a uterus, with many experiencing severe symptoms ranging from heavy bleeding and chronic pain to infertility and complications during pregnancy.
Endometriosis, another condition Kho treats frequently, impacts roughly one in nine women.
“It can start even before adolescence and impact women through menopause,” Kho said. “It’s associated with chronic pain, depression and anxiety, and we’re only now beginning to understand how widespread the disease really is.”
For many patients in Hawaiʻi, access to specialized treatment has historically been limited. Women with complex cases often had to travel to the mainland to receive advanced surgical care including treatment options that are more fertility and uterine sparing. The new professorship was designed to change that.
“It speaks to the commitment to advancing clinical care for our community,” Kho said. “People were leaving the state to seek this kind of care or being presented with treatment options that didn’t honor their values, including more radical surgeries that would lead to loss of fertility. Now we’re building the ability to provide those advanced, complex services here.”
Kho was recruited specifically for the role, bringing with her nearly two decades of experience in minimally invasive gynecologic surgery. After completing her fellowship in 2008, she became part of the first wave of specialists trained to treat complex benign gynecologic diseases using advanced laparoscopic and robotic techniques.
At UT Southwestern, Kho helped build a program from the ground up. When she arrived, she was the first physician in the institution with her specialty training. By the time she left, the division had grown to eight fellowship-trained surgeons focused entirely on treating benign gynecologic conditions.
Now, she hopes to build something similar in Hawaiʻi.
“Our goal is to create an academic division that stands alongside high-risk obstetrics and gynecologic oncology,” Kho said.
Building that program requires more than surgery. Kho is working to strengthen collaboration across specialties while also helping raise awareness about conditions that have long been misunderstood or overlooked.
“We have to educate our community, our patients and other healthcare providers,” she said. “A lot of patients show up in emergency rooms with severe pain and scans that look normal, and they’re told nothing is wrong. We have to start thinking differently and offer options that work for them.”
Kho says Hawaiʻi already has the talent and expertise needed to support this work.
“What’s amazing is that the skill sets are already here,” she said. “The radiologists, pain specialists, physical therapists…they are all here. They just needed someone to help organize and bring those teams under the umbrella of multidisciplinary care together.”
The impact is already being felt by patients. Kho recalls one woman who had been preparing to fly to the mainland for treatment before discovering that the specialized care she needed was now available closer to home.
“She woke up after surgery, saw me and cried,” Kho said. “She said, ‘I’m so glad you’re in Hawaiʻi so I can get my care here at home.’”
Her example reinforces the importance of the investment JABSOM made in the professorship and women’s health, the first of its kind in the U.S. at a major academic institution.
“Diagnosis alone can be empowering,” Kho said. “To finally understand what’s happening to your body. But then we can also treat it and meet women where they are, whether they’re 14, 28 or 52.”