Academy of Master Surgeon Educators Grand Rounds Series

Andrew R. Watson, MD, M Litt, FACS, is a fourth-generation surgeon and the eighth surgeon in his family. He earned his master’s degree at the University of Oxford studying 17th Century Baroque Architecture and attended medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He did his surgical internship, residency, and minimally invasive fellowship at UPMC.

He is an actively practicing colorectal surgeon at UPMC, he specializes in minimally invasive and complex/salvage re-operative inflammatory bowel disease surgery. He is the primary colorectal surgeon in the IBD medical home under UPMC Insurance Services Division. He was a co-founder of IBD Live, a national weekly video grand-rounds that focuses on value-based and complex IBD cases. He is on the multi-site stakeholder-advisory board (SAB) of the UPMC Insurance Services PCORI grant focusing on IBD complex care.

He actively uses and helps to develop telemedicine at UPMC with a focus on remote patient monitoring, he has done more than 530 virtual consults including preoperative, postoperative, tele-rounding, intra-operative, and remote patient monitoring. He was President of the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) in 2019 and was influential in rebalancing the board to include multiple payers and with a focus on value for telemedicine. He was program chair in 2018 and served on all committees over 8 years including its strategy committee, executive, finance and audit. He was elected as a Fellow of the ATA in 2020. He co-founded and co-leads the national tweet-chat #TelemedNow starting in early 2020 which gives practical advice and guidance to the front lines of virtual care in the US. He an inaugural member of the American Board of Telehealth.

Jyotirmay (Joe) Sharma, MD, FACS, is Associate Professor and William C. McGarity Chair of Surgery in the Division of General and GI Surgery of the Department of Surgery at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Sharma also serves as Vice-chair for Quality, Patient Safety and Innovation and Director of Thyroid and Endocrine Surgery at Emory University Hospital.

Dr. Sharma is heavily involved in the Department of Surgery's quality and safety efforts, particularly as chair of the Wound Infection Group, which formed with a mandate to reduce surgical site infection (SSIs) at Emory hospitals. SSIs are one of the more common health care-associated infections. The multidisciplinary group's agenda involves all aspects of patient care, from preoperative visits and perioperative counseling to intraoperative issues and post-op care. He is a member of multiple CMS The-expert-panels and NQF Common Formats panel.

Dr. Sharma is also a frequent faculty participant in Emory Haiti Alliance summer surgical trips to hospitals in Haiti's Central Plateau, the poorest and most medically underserved region in all of Haiti. He routinely performs outpatient parathyroidectomies, outpatient thyroidectomies, and adrenalectomies using minimally invasive techniques and has published various journal articles on these techniques. Dr. Sharma will be the Chair of the ACS Board of Governors Telemedicine Workgroup.

Catherine A. Matthews, MD, FACS, is Professor of Urology and Gynecology at Wake Forest Baptist Health and serves as the Fellowship Director of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery and Co-Director of the Female Pelvic Health Center. She is the senior author of a paper outlining a toolkit for implementation of telemedicine that was published in the August issue of JACS.  Dr. Matthews is passionate about education and has delivered over 100 invited international and national lectures and workshops and has received numerous teaching awards. Dr. Matthews has received multiple awards for her excellence in patient care and has been an annual recipient of "Top Doctors in America" for the past 15 years. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in pelvic organ prolapse surgery, robotic-assisted sacrocolpopexy and fecal incontinence.