Advanced Gynecologic Care Delivered With a Personal Touch

Hi! I’m Dr. Melissa Moore. I am a board certified OB/GYN and the only certified Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgeon in the Grand Strand.  I grew up in South Georgia and jokingly refers to myself as the only person who moved north to get to Myrtle Beach.  After attending Spring Hill College on a full academic scholarship and obtaining degrees in Biology and History with a minor in chemistry, I went on to study medicine at the Medical College of Georgia.  MCG is one of the largest medical schools in the country and has the necessity of serving a large population over a large geographical area. This provided me with the opportunity to see multiple practice models and work with alot of different providers in different parts of the state.  While learning the principles of medical ethics as a first year, it was stressed that patient autonomy should be at the center of our care. I was also strongly influenced during this time by two off campus groups - Medical Campus Outreach and Spirit and Truth. They filled in the “why” of medicine - because every person deserves to be taken care of the way I would want my own family cared for. This is also where I met the love of my life, James. 

I then completed my residency at the UF College of Medicine Jacksonville.  As a hybrid academic/community program, there was a lot of cutting edge care, but also an emphasis on taking care of whoever walked in the door. There were challenging groups of patients and the program made a strong effort to reach out and find a way to work with patients. It was the goal of the entire program to meet the patient where they were and accompany them on their journey and find a way to deliver care they could access. Things that are now routine - putting baby up on mom’s chest immediately after delivery, early skin to skin, and delayed cord clamping were groundbreaking at the time. I also found a love of reproductive endocrinology. The clinic I trained at placed a huge emphasis on improving metabolic health to improve reproductive health and had great success in helping women achieve pregnancy using noninvasive techniques like ovulation induction. These doctors were also amazing surgeons and were doing great things in understanding and correcting pelvic pain and endometriosis.  

I then returned home to South Georgia to practice. I have always loved the South - the accents, the smiles, and the fact that there are more peanuts than people in town.  There were things about the practice’s care model that were great - like delivering hundreds of babies a year and getting to take care of generations of women in the same family. The clinic functioned in a way that allowed the doctors more freedom to take care of a high needs patients. I was able to drop things for an hour sometimes because we had an excellent support staff, but there were never quite enough hours in the day most of the time. The job was very surgery heavy and was almost like doing a fellowship in minimally invasive gynecology - though the certification would come later.  It was also here that I welcomed my first child. My pregnancy was handled by an excellent midwife and I was delivered by a close friend/OBGYN. It’s an experience of medicine that few people get. I knew everyone in the room. I delivered with my family and my work family.   I believe every woman deserves to be cared for by a provider who has taken the time to get to know her.

After becoming a mom (and the grandparents leaving the area), priorities changed and a new chapter opened in Murrell’s Inlet. I joined a private practice and set about building a new patient base. Starting from scratch at 35 was a lot different than starting from scratch at 30, but what didn’t change was a dedication to good patient care.  My desire is to just be a great doc and this quickly helped me build a practice.  I also received the amazing blessing of my second child.  Once again, I delivered with a team of favorite midwife, close personal friend/OB-GYN, and a room of other colleagues - including an amazing tech/birth photographer who captured the memories.  I was confident in the skills of every member of my team.

I continued to fiercely advocated for my patients serving on the Perinatal Improvement Committee and insisting that no woman should be forced to deliver alone. The birth of a child is too imporant to let a pandemic get in the way. Given the changing healthcare landscape of COVID, the practice ultimately ended up forming a partnership with a hospital. Suddenly, there was an extra layer of administrators between doctor and patient. The services we had provided in office to make sure patient’s could access care were moved out of the office.

As a long time advocate for putting as few barriers between a patient and necessary services, I found the new practice model highly constraining.  The one thing it did afford was a little extra time for a long planned project.  In 2024, I completed my certification for the Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgeon board.  The extra piece of paper didn’t change the job, but was a huge validation of the time throughout my career it took to develop high level skills.

In 2025, I decided that I could provide better care to patients by opening my own practice. By going small, I can do it better, make it personal and do it for a lower cost.