Dr. Ron Karni Celebrates a Decade and a Half of Service to UTHealth Houston
During the past 15 years, Ron J. Karni, MD, and his colleagues have created a world-class head and neck cancer treatment program in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.
“Creating a program from the ground up gave us the opportunity to bring in novel ideas from outside the standard treatment paradigm and build our program focused on very individualized patient-centered care,” says Dr. Karni, chief of the Division of Head and Neck Surgical Oncology and an associate professor in the department with a joint appointment in the Division of Medical Oncology. “Patients travel from across Texas and neighboring states for appointments that typically include visits with a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician skilled in meeting the needs of people affected by cancer, lymphedema specialists, speech-language pathologists, reconstructive surgeons, and other clinicians who specialize in helping head and neck cancer patients with swallowing and vocal difficulties, range of motion deficits, and the psychological effects of survivorship. If you walk into my office with a lump in your neck, we do an in-office biopsy that is examined by our pathologist on the spot, giving you an immediate diagnosis without the stress of waiting several days for the pathology report.”
A native of Houston, Dr. Karni returned to join the Department of Otorhinolaryngology in 2009 after finishing his medical education. “Medicine was a natural for me. My father, brother, and wife are all doctors,” he says. “When I was growing up, I saw the self-fulfillment in my father’s eyes, which is one of the greatest benefits of being a doctor. You’re making a living and at the same time making a difference in people’s lives. It was easy to follow in my father’s footsteps.”
While training in otorhinolaryngology, Dr. Karni found he was most drawn to cancer patients. “We have a longer patient-physician relationship, and we are with them through lows and highs. Cancer patients need us in a way that people with most other diseases don’t, and it was a good match for me,” he says. “Sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we hold hands and cry together. It’s almost always a very intense relationship, which is the challenge and it’s also the reward.”
Dr. Karni is a 1999 graduate of Brandeis University with a bachelor’s degree in biology and anthropology. He returned to Houston to take his medical degree at Baylor College of Medicine, and in 2008, completed residency training at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The following year, he joined the Department of Otorhinolaryngology as an assistant professor.
“When I came in 2009, the department was in the rebuilding stage, and I was the third faculty recruit. It was an opportunity to build the infrastructure of a department from the ground up,” he says. “Dr. Martin Citardi, the department chair, is incredible to work with. When I joined the department, I said, ‘Let’s build a head and neck cancer program,’ and he said, ‘How can we get there?’”
In addition to innovating in head and neck cancer treatment, the department has been among the first to bring robotic thyroidectomy and minimally invasive thyroidectomy and parathyroidectomy to the OR. “We have deployed avant-garde techniques and technologies for cancer, thyroid, and parathyroid disease,” he says. “The technology we work with is amazing. UTHealth Houston is an excellent environment for people who want to push the envelope and build new programs.”
Certified by the American Board of Otolaryngology, Dr. Karni focuses his practice on management of HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer; thyroid and parathyroid disorders; diagnostic ultrasonography and fine-needle aspiration of head and neck masses; transoral surgery for throat, larynx, and oral cavity cancer; and salivary gland tumors. He performs more than 200 thyroid and parathyroid surgical procedures each year and leads a multidisciplinary ultrasound-guided aspiration biopsy clinic for thyroid nodules. He is the author of publications on robotic head and neck surgery, workup of the occult head and neck cancer, and integrating evidence-based methods in cancer survivorship.
Dr. Karni also is part of a well-evolved research team that includes Eva Sevick-Muraca, PhD, professor and director of the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine Center for Molecular Imaging and the Nancy and Rich Kinder Distinguished Chair of Cardiovascular Disease at McGovern Medical School, and Janet Van Cleave, PhD, RN, an associate professor in the Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston. Dr. Sevick has pioneered the development of near-infrared fluorescence optical imaging and tomography for molecular imaging and currently has clinical trials underway that employ the technology for novel diagnostic lymphatic imaging. Dr. Karni is a co-investigator on a one-year $72,000 supplement to Dr. Van Cleave’s R01 grant, “Implementing the NYU Electronic Patient Visit Assessment (ePVA) for Head and Neck Cancer in Rural and Urban Population.”
Dr. Karni serves as the physician lead of the Memorial Hermann Cancer Accountable Care Organization, one of the region’s first health system Cancer ACOs. The ACO has directly improved the quality of cancer care across Memorial Hermann and brings oncologists, rehabilitation specialists, gastroenterologists, and other clinicians together five times each year to work on improving cancer treatment and the patient experience.
As he moves forward with the department, Dr. Karni’s goal is to expand the head and neck cancer program and fortify the Memorial Hermann/UTHealth cancer brand, a special combination of caring and expertise unique in the Houston area. “We’re making sure we’re enrolling patients appropriately in clinical trials as we work on new drug development. What’s coming next is artificial intelligence, which will make documentation easier for doctors so we can spend more time with our patients,” he says. “My goal for the next five years is to grow our program in volumes and in depth. We’re very ambitious about the benefits we can achieve for our cancer patients.”