What is joy? It’s not cheerfulness, or even happiness. No, joy isn’t dependent on circumstances; in fact, true joy can be present in the face of grief, or pain, or disappointment. Joy is a deep, abiding thing. It overcomes; it even triumphs.
For nearly 200 years, since Ludwig van Beethoven composed it in 1824, joy has had a melody: It’s the last movement of his Ninth symphony, which features singers soaring to reach impossibly high notes and a powerful melody that has come to represent joy, and greatness that overcomes, to people around the world. The last movement of the Ninth, also known as the Ode to Joy, transcends cultures. Protestors played it over loudspeakers at Tiananmen Square during the bloody demonstrations of 1989. It blared from the rooftops again in 1989, half a world away, when reunited East and West Germans danced together at the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Japan, the Ninth is associated with the freedom and new hope experienced when those held in prison camps were released after World War II; thousands of Japanese gather every December 9th to sing along with the melody. To Christians, it’s a beloved hymn, whose lyrics include the phrase, “Joyful music leads us sunward in the triumph song of life.”
It’s also our official anthem here at the Center for Innovative Medicine, and the music has more to do with medicine than you might think.
How this came to be is a story that involves five key players. It started with David Hellmann, who has always been inspired by the Ninth. “In the Fourth Movement, there is one part that really speaks to me,” he says. “I play it over and over. It begins with a beautiful melody, played softly on the cello. Then it is played on the viola, and then even louder on the violin. Then the entire orchestra plays this melody – which is now familiar, but it’s also strikingly new, and beautiful in a new way because it is being played by everyone.” Hellmann sees this as a metaphor for what he hopes the CIM will accomplish. “Our goal is to do for medicine what Beethoven did for music.”
One day in late 2014, philanthropist Stephanie Cooper Greenberg, the head of our International Advisory Board, happened to be outside Hellmann’s office when he was playing it. “He said, ‘Hold on a second, I want you to listen to something.’ It was the Ode to Joy,” she recalls. Hellmann told her how he felt it captured the CIM’s mission. Intrigued, Greenberg did some research on the Ninth, “to see why it mattered so much, why it was the adopted anthem.” Then she came across a trailer for a new documentary film called Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony, written and directed by Kerry Candaele, and filmed on five continents and in 12 countries. The film followed people whose lives have been “transformed, repaired and healed by the movie’s message,” she says. “I clicked on this trailer and was totally blown away. It was everything that David Hellmann spoke of, and it became very apparent why he believes Ode to Joy represents the CIM. It’s the ultimate collaborative work, and it’s also an anthem of freedom – from constraint, systems, oppression. The CIM is not exactly fighting tanks, but metaphorically it is doing things that are different in health care from anybody else out there.” More than that, she realized the music’s enduring, life-changing significance to so many people.
Greenberg clicked on a hyperlink for those who were interested in screening the film, which had not yet been widely released. She sent a brief message by e-mail. Not too long afterward, “the phone rings, and it’s the filmmaker. Oh, my gosh! I was pretty much babbling through the conversation.” It turns out that Kerry Candaele, the third person in our story, is also a musicologist and teacher in addition to being a noted filmmaker. “He was so captivated by the Ninth that he created this film to document the trajectory of this piece of music. He was kind enough to send me the whole film.” Greenberg loved it; Hellmann loved it. They decided to hold a special screening, sponsored by the CIM, at Johns Hopkins Bayview. “That’s how it came to be. It was purely serendipitous.”
The timing couldn’t have been better: at the Asthma and Allergy Center, after work on February 11, in the dregs of a cold, snowy Baltimore winter. The movie was shown to a packed auditorium in two parts. In between came the fourth key player in our story: Tom Hall, Director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. Greenberg had reached out to him, too, introducing herself and springing what she calls now “a ridiculous request, when I think about it: Can you explain Beethoven’s Ninth in 10 minutes? Why it’s relevant.” Hall agreed, and “he was really the star of the show.”
During his brief talk, Hall told the crowd that his own cancer had been cured at Johns Hopkins, and he “began weaving the narrative of the Ninth and the story of the music with how you can be doing something and it creates something else that’s bigger than you ever imagined. How the CIM does the same thing, doing very hard work, but at the end of the day, helping, inspiring, and lifting people up, promoting change in the right direction,” says Greenberg. “And all of a sudden, it becomes not about Beethoven, or Tiananmen Square; it becomes about what everyone in the room is there for. He unified the notion that the CIM is about all of us together. The audience totally got what it was all about – that if we do things together, we can be better, do more, and really change the way we practice medicine. Sometimes one thing comes along and defines something else that’s completely different. It helped define what was right there all along.”
Hellmann says, “it was a magical night. Many in the audience made a point of telling me afterward that they felt restored and renewed.”
But the story would be incomplete without the fifth person, and that is Beethoven himself. Beethoven, despite a legacy of composing some of the world’s greatest music, did not have a very happy life. He had family troubles, money worries, and more stress than most of us could handle gracefully; his own temperament tended to be difficult, and on top of everything, he had health problems, chronic abdominal pain and digestive illness, and degenerative hearing loss that led to deafness.
The options for Beethoven were the same that many of us face: He could have decided, with some justification, that he’d been given more than anyone should have to bear. He could have withdrawn and given up on life, becoming increasingly bitter, self-pitying and defeated. But Beethoven was never one to take the easy path. Instead, he took all of the things that should have made him weak, and found the strength to create beauty. He transcended his physical limitations, and achieved greatness. He overcame. “Beethoven hungered for this joy,” says Hellmann. “He captured it in his music, and it lives in us today.” In addition to everything else it does, “the Ninth reminds us, as caregivers, that within every person, no matter how difficult the disease might be, there is the potential to embrace joy.”
Don Willett July 31st, 2015
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What comes to mind when you hear the words, “rheumatoid arthritis?” Well, if you don’t have it, you might think of terribly swollen joints, or pain. Ask people who suffer from RA what they’re concerned about, and the answers may surprise you. There’s pain, sure. But also fatigue, trouble sleeping, depression, anxiety, and worries about being able to handle normal daily activities and chores.
Unfortunately, these are not usually the things that people with RA generally discuss with their doctors. Which is why Johns Hopkins Bayview rheumatologists are doing something revolutionary to find out how their patients are really doing: They’re asking them.
Rheumatologists can look at numbers until the cows come home. They can determine precise things – such as how many swollen and tender joints their patients are dealing with; and which inflammatory markers, as determined by lab tests, are in their blood, and what those numbers are. “Those numbers have been determined by experts as the best outcomes to measure,” says rheumatologist Clifton Bingham, M.D., Director of the Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center, and of the new Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research in Rheumatology “But they don’t always reflect what’s really happening in our patients’ lives – what they’re not doing because of pain, or fatigue, or depression, or something else. And maybe the whole visit would come and go and we wouldn’t know something was wrong because we didn’t ask the right questions.”
Numbers hardly ever tell the whole story. “It’s hard to believe,” says David Hellmann, M.D., a rheumatologist and also Director of the Center for Innovative Medicine, “but most traditional research never considered the patient’s opinion or reaction to the treatment. Imagine reading a restaurant review that discusses the temperature of the butter, meat and wine – but not how any of it tasted! – and you will have a sense of how previous research on treatment left out the patient. The good news is that the creation of this new Center is a systematic effort to measure the patient’s perspective.”
Bingham has long worked on finding ways to make care for people with RA more patient-centered. For years, he has reached out to patients and gotten their perspective, asking them questions such as: What aspects of your life are most affected by RA? What do you want to be able to do? And how can we work with you so that you can make this happen?
The goals between patients can vary widely, says Bingham: Maybe Patient A’s goal is to continue a job that’s pretty demanding physically – teaching middle school and coaching the girl’s volleyball team. But Patient B just wants to be able to drive to the grocery store and go to church, and go out with her friends for lunch afterwards. And Patient C is taking care of his wife, who is an invalid. Continuing to do this is what matters to him the most; in fact, it’s what gets him out of bed in the morning and keeps him going all day.
These patients need personalized medicine.
A couple of years ago, Bingham was one of a few in the country to receive Federal funding for a pilot project from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI, pronounced “picori”). His project: to test a NIH-developed system called PROMIS (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System) in clinic patients with RA. He implemented an interactive questionnaire that tackled not only physical manifestations of disease, but lifestyle issues – activities at home and work, and how satisfied patients feel with their ability to function in various areas. Patients filled out the questionnaire before they saw the doctor in the clinic, and together, after the regular check-up, they looked at the questionnaire to see what might have been missed in the visit. The questionnaire, Bingham found, “enabled conversation that might not have happened otherwise.”
Recently, he and his team received additional PCORI funding for a second project to expand this work and move it forward. Bingham hopes that what he and colleagues are learning about incorporating patients’ wishes and concerns into their health care plan will expand beyond rheumatology, and eventually spread throughout Hopkins. “Our first project was working to see what would happen if we used this system and provided the information to patients and their doctors,” Bingham says. “The results of the first study very clearly demonstrated the many areas of health that are affected by RA,” and how they change as the disease is more or less active. “These new measures are able to reflect the impact of the disease even when patients are having what we would define clinically as ‘low disease activity’ – which is very important, because then we can see that there is considerable impairment.”
In the treatment of many diseases – cancer, for instance – new research has shown that “there tends to be considerable discordance between the perception of a doctor or nurse, compared with the opinion of the person who actually has the disease. Physicians consistently underestimate the magnitude or impact of symptoms on the patient. What we hope is that through this work, we can provide clinicians with a better understanding of how a disease is affecting the patient.”
Currently, Bingham and colleagues are asking patients to fill out a questionnaire every time they come in for a visit, so they can track and measure changes in how the patient’s doing over time. For example: “One of my patients, when she is in remission of her RA and things are extremely well-controlled, her physical function is such that she can run a half-marathon. But when her arthritis begins to flare, she can only run a mile, and that’s a huge difference in her physical function. Both her starting point and her endpoint, using a standard measure of physical function, would be considered ‘normal’ – but the change from Point A to Point B, what’s important to her, has been dramatic and huge.” The traditional measurements would only signal trouble if she couldn’t walk a mile. “But for her, that first sign of trouble is that change in how far she can run.” Using these far more sensitive guidelines can help Bingham anticipate and prevent trouble sooner.
At the new Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, Bingham and investigators are expanding this type of research to encompass different types of arthritis, myositis, and Sjogren’s syndrome, and soon they plan to include other diseases, as well.
Don Willett August 2nd, 2015
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Michelangelo nailed it, of course. His “Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel captures the ultimate action shot – that first spark of life. But for most of us, armed with a camera instead of a paintbrush, it’s not that easy to capture a special moment. It’s especially tricky in the world of medicine, where some of the events we see are heartbreaking, and some are breathtaking, and all of them are fleeting. This kind of moment-capturing is impossible to manufacture; you can’t make it happen – think of any staged photos you’ve seen in medical ads and slick annual reports. No, for us non-Michelangelos attempting to freeze-frame an encounter, the best we can hope for is that we’ll have the wit to recognize it and the presence of mind to click the shutter in time.
Sheldon Gottlieb, M.D., has both in spades. He’s been taking pictures since he was a kid, and has learned how to anticipate when a moment is about to happen. On top of that, he is a gifted clinician, a cardiologist who knows what good teaching is, how doctors are supposed to talk to patients and how to listen to them, and how to tell when the message is getting across. In 2010, David Hellmann, M.D., Director of the CIM, gave him an unusual challenge: He asked Gottlieb to illustrate, photographically, the process of caring.
“What was special about this opportunity was that David didn’t tell me what to do or how to do it,” says Gottlieb. So the first thing he needed to do was “figure out exactly what caring was. You know it when you see it, but what is it, really? I spent a lot of time reading about caring, and then I began carrying my camera around in the hospital, and asking permission to take pictures. I tried to capture that special moment where people really interact with each other – that decisive moment when people connect, or that special thing happens that’s never going to happen again.”
As he started watching the countless interactions that went on around him, Gottlieb says, he started to notice things: that “some of the house staff have a way of connecting with the patient,” for example. “They really go eye to eye, and you can see that special spark of recognition, the electricity flowing between two people. In other cases, it’s just not there.
“When you start to see with your photographer’s eye,” he continues, “you see these moments and think, ‘That was a picture,’ if you don’t have your camera. If you do have a camera, you’ve got a split second. If you’re there and you’re ready, you can catch it.”
Gottlieb took pictures for many months, and then showed Hellmann a portfolio of what he had done. Hellmann, in turn, put Gottlieb in touch with Michael Linehan, the architect at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, so that they could create a long-term exhibit, a Gallery of Caring, now on display in the foyer outside the Department of Medicine on the third floor of the Mason F. Lord Building. “It’s almost like they created a sacred space,” says Gottlieb. “You come out of the elevator, make a left, go through double doors, and there is this big, empty space.”
Some large corporations produce booklets or brochures to show the world that they are responsible citizens, Gottlieb notes. “This is kind of a corporate responsibility statement. It’s more than just demonstrating caring. It’s showing how the Department of Medicine itself is dedicated to that concept.”
Linehan’s touches to the exhibit are many. He cropped the pictures and printed them with similar tones, all black and white, so that an observer could move from one to the next seamlessly. “I think the thing for me,” he says, “although the title of the exhibit is Caring, as I began to work on them, the pictures struck me in a different way. Not that they didn’t exhibit caring, but “memento mori” (Latin for “remember that you have to die”) – pictures of people who realize that they are coming close to the end of their lives, and you can see in their faces their reaction to that understanding that they’re about to walk through the door. When you are reacting to photographs, you have no idea what they’re really thinking; you always read some of your own preconceptions into it. But that’s a legitimate thing to do. For me, I saw people thinking about that, and some of them were obviously afraid, some were putting on a brave face, and some were displaying their acceptance of the situation, and expressing faith,” with empathetic doctors and nurses in the background.
“He really did capture people at the magic moment, and what’s behind the skin leaps out,” Linehan says. “When you see them all together, I think they’re quite powerful. It’s the sort of thing you can’t walk past without thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to look at these.’ This is dramatic, in an extremely human way.”
Because Linehan wanted to make the exhibit as interactive as possible, he did not hang the pictures on the walls. Instead, he put them smack in the middle of the space, on tables. They are tilted toward the viewer at a 45-degree angle, about four feet off the ground, two images per table. “The pictures are not easy to breeze past. They are very much in your personal space; they’re right there, somehow more confrontational than they would be on the wall. To see a photograph that size – two feet by four feet – on the wall, you would have to stand back to take it all in. But these you’re able to walk up to a little more closely. You don’t have to step back. Clearly these images are not part of the background.”
In putting the exhibit together, Linehan says, he “just reacted to each thing the way I saw it.” The sum total of the pictures “really kind of got to me. It was an emotional experience just to do the design work, and that’s a real tribute to Sheldon. It takes a particularly good photographer to do that.”
The exhibit is open to the public. All are welcome to come and view it.
Don Willett August 2nd, 2015
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This is a story of a neglected disease, several bad health policy decisions, some good science, collaboration and outside-the-box thinking, and an insight that may make a huge difference for African Americans at risk of chronic kidney disease. In short, it’s the kind of innovative medicine we love at the CIM.
Long, long ago, sickle cell trait (SCT) evolved as a beneficial thing in parts of the world plagued by a very bad thing: disease-bearing mosquitos. This inherited trait (see side story) caused a mutation in the genes for hemoglobin, the molecule in the red blood cells that carries oxygen. The change, generally subtle, was enough to protect the body from malaria.
Science has swung back and forth on the importance of SCT as a health risk. Nearly half a century ago, SCT was a cause of discrimination for African Americans, affecting employment, health insurance, even marriage policies, says hematologist Rakhi Naik, M.D. Then for a decade or so, SCT faded out of the limelight, taking a back seat to other conditions. It bounced back into the public radar in the 1970s, when four people who died during rigorous military training turned out to have the trait. Worried about the risk of sudden death during extreme exertion, as experienced in boot camp, the U.S. Army began screening everyone for SCT. “In the 1980s, that stopped,” says Naik, “because of lack of good data. They had the suspicion that SCT increased the risk of sudden death, but no real scientific proof” that people with this particular set of genes were any more at risk than anyone else. Instead, the military changed its training protocol across the board, making sure everybody received better monitoring and care, better hydration to avoid heat-related illness, and longer recovery time after strenuous drills. The SCT policy world was fairly quiet until 2010, when a 19-year-old NCAA Division I football player at Rice University in Houston died after doing sprints. Autopsy results suggested that SCT might have been to blame for the cause of death, acute exertional rhabdomyolysis (muscle breakdown).
It turned out that this young man wasn’t alone. Between 2000 and 2013, as many as 10 Division I college football players who died suddenly after hard workouts turned out to have SCT. In response, the NCAA instituted mandatory SCT screening for all incoming student athletes – a move to which several medical groups objected, calling the policy “medically groundless, perhaps even dangerous,” and “focused more on protecting the NCAA from legal liability than protecting the health of student athletes.” The American Society of Hematology proposed a Universal Precautions-type plan similar to what the Army was doing – preventive interventions, such as rest, hydration, heat acclimation, and monitoring, for everybody. The NCAA’s policy, says Naik, is partly responsible for a resurgence of scientific interest in SCT – mainly because it “was another policy made without any data.”
Naik became interested in SCT while she was earning her Master’s of Public Health degree at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. With the encouragement of Sophie Lanzkron, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Sickle Cell Center for Adults, she began exploring some of the huge, ongoing population study groups of people with SCT being followed by the National Institutes of Health – some for 30 years or more. Naik noticed that one health problem, in particular, kept popping up: kidney disease. This was not necessarily new – again, there were policies based on it – and some organ donor programs rejected the kidneys of people with SCT. And again, “these policies were based on just a hunch, not on real data,” Naik says.
Naik notes that as a young researcher, she wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as she has without the mentorship and support of other investigators, in different disciplines. Two of them were rheumatologist James G. Wilson, head of the Genetics Committee of the University of Mississippi’s Jackson Heart Cohort, a large study of cardiovascular disease among African Americans; and Alex Reiner, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Washington. Gradually a research project took shape that has led, most recently, to the publication of an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), with Naik as first author.
In this important study of nearly 16,000 African Americans with and without SCT, Naik, Wilson, Reiner, Lanzkron, and colleagues found a higher risk of chronic kidney disease in people with SCT. “Everybody has understood that African Americans have a greater frequency of renal disease, and nobody has understood why,” says Vice Dean David Hellmann, M.D., Director of the CIM. “What Rakhi just published in JAMA is a whole new concept that sickle cell trait is not necessarily a benign disease, and that it is a powerful predictor of developing kidney disease.” Stresses, such as insufficient oxygen, undoubtedly play a role. “So someone with SCT goes up 15,000 feet in an airplane, or gets operated on and develops pneumonia or hypoxia: these sickle trait cells can change shape and ‘sickle’ to some degree.”
And in the kidney, these sickle trait cells may do some things that lead to repetitive small injuries to the organ – and this may lead to kidney disease over time.
Naik is collaborating with a handful of investigators at several institutions to determine “the next steps,” she says, “answering this question of whether kidney donors and recipients have problems with sickle trait, and whether or not SCT is associated with other outcomes, such as stroke and heart disease. All of these are speculative. Resolving these questions actually helps us – in terms of not making policies that are not based on data – figure out what we can do about it. This has been a neglected field.” She hopes that this research can determine some smart guidelines on how best to follow people with SCT over time.
“Knowledge is power, and we need evidence-based decisions,” she adds, “instead of what’s happening now, which is making blanket policies with no data. It will be much better once we have the actual evidence – such as whether someone is at an increased risk or a moderate risk, and which markers we can follow over time. As opposed to general panic and the extreme, ‘Let’s test everybody.’”
Don Willett August 2nd, 2015
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If the mission to recognize and reward clinical excellence were a mountain, then every year at the Miller-Coulson Academy Excellence in Patient Care Symposium, the usual speakers – including Academy Director Scott Wright, M.D.; Vice Dean and CIM Director David Hellmann, M.D.; Dean and CEO Paul Rothman, M.D.; Hospital and Health System President Ron Peterson; Miller Scholar and Vice Dean Roy Ziegelstein, M.D. – and all of the newest members of the Academy would be standing on higher ground. Because every year, there is more progress to celebrate.
This year marked the 7th Annual Symposium, and the second year that the event was held at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. At the request of Rothman, the Academy expanded last year to include faculty from both the downtown and Bayview campuses, with a long-term goal of rewarding clinical excellence at all Johns Hopkins medical facilities. The Academy, made possible through the generosity and dedication to clinical excellence of the Miller-Coulson Family, has evolved over the years in other important ways, as well. For example: In honor of the late Frank L. Coulson, Jr., the Academy added an annual Award for Clinical Excellence to exceptional doctors-in-training (and potential future Academy members) in all 20 Hopkins residency programs. The Academy has started a coaching program, in which master clinicians serve as mentors to help new faculty develop and improve their clinical skills. Every class of interns in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview crafts an oath, and develops an image – this year’s comes from a photo an intern snapped of the North Star – to go with it, that reminds them to be clinically excellent. And this year, for the first time, there were awards for clinically excellent Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants, introduced by Patricia Davidson, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Nursing.
This year marked the 7th Annual Symposium, and the second year that the event was held at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. At the request of Rothman, the Academy expanded last year to include faculty from both the downtown and Bayview campuses, with a long-term goal of rewarding clinical excellence at all Johns Hopkins medical facilities. The Academy, made possible through the generosity and dedication to clinical excellence of the Miller-Coulson Family, has evolved over the years in other important ways, as well. For example: In honor of the late Frank L. Coulson, Jr., the Academy added an annual Award for Clinical Excellence to exceptional doctors-in-training (and potential future Academy members) in all 20 Hopkins residency programs. The Academy has started a coaching program, in which master clinicians serve as mentors to help new faculty develop and improve their clinical skills. Every class of interns in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview crafts an oath, and develops an image – this year’s comes from a photo an intern snapped of the North Star – to go with it, that reminds them to be clinically excellent. And this year, for the first time, there were awards for clinically excellent Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants, introduced by Patricia Davidson, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Nursing.
“The Academy is expanding in many important ways,” says Scott Wright, M.D., Director of the Miller-Coulson Academy. One of the areas of progress that he’s most excited about: “Dean Paul Rothman has asked the Academy to work with the Promotions Committee to come up with a way for the institution to recognize clinical excellence for the purposes of promotion. We have rigorous methods that we use to decide who gets into the Academy every year,” which have been adopted by Ohio State University and other medical schools around the country to help them determine which clinicians should be promoted. But at Hopkins, like most academic medical centers, “in the past, clinical performance has not been taken into consideration in determining promotion,” Wright notes.
It is not unusual at Hopkins for an excellent, distinguished clinician, even after decades of practice and teaching, to hold the rank of assistant professor or instructor. In fact, out of the 14 outstanding Johns Hopkins physicians joining the Academy this year, the vast majority are associate professors. “I think it’s because we as an institution haven’t committed the resources to assessing clinical performance,” adds Wright, “and because we haven’t done that, we really aren’t able to consider clinical performance at the time of promotion.”
Wright is a member of the Promotions Committee for the Department of Medicine. “Each year, we look at people who spend 80 percent of their time doing clinical work, and we judge them for promotion based on what they do in the other 20 percent of their time. (We are) making decisions on their worthiness for advancement based on what they do in the minority of their time and effort.”
This is changing; Rothman and other Hopkins leaders agree with Wright’s assessment. Of the four pathways for faculty at Hopkins to get promoted, “there is a pathway in the promotions book called the ‘Clinician with Distinction Pathway,’” says Wright, “but nobody gets promoted on that pathway. The exciting news is that now the Academy is working with the Promotion Committee to reconsider that pathway and make it into a true avenue that will allow some of our best clinicians to get promoted.” The recommendation to do that came to the Dean from a committee, co-chaired by Wright with David Eisele, director of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, that was specifically geared toward “thinking about how Hopkins is going to recruit or retain the best clinicians”– a committee that didn’t exist a few years ago. “The bottom line is that the Academy is a success, and due to this success, we’re being asked to help the institution with respect to all things related to clinical excellence.”
To see more of this year’s Symposium, please go to hopkinscim.org.
The 2015 Inductees into the Miller-Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence are:
John O’Brien Clarke, Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology; Clinical Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Neurogastroenterology and Clinical Director of Johns Hopkins Bayview Gastroenterology & Hepatology.
John Fetting, Associate Professor of Oncology; he served as Associate Director for Clinical Practice for the Department of Oncology from 1998 until 2015, when he resigned to focus on his breast cancer practice and the Fetting Fund for Breast Cancer Prevention Research.
Derek Fine, Associate Professor of Medicine and Fellowship Program Director in the Division of Nephrology.
Elliot K. Fishman, Professor of Radiology, Surgery, and Oncology; Director of Diagnostic Imaging and Body CT at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Mitchell Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics; Director of the Hopkins Child Protection Team; Director of CHAMP, a statewide system for managing child maltreatment.
Carol Ann Huff, Associate Professor of Oncology and Medicine and Director of the Multiple Myeloma Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Daniel A. Laheru, Associate Professor of Oncology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center; the Ian T. MacMillan Professor in Clinical Pancreatic Cancer Research; Clinical Director, Division of Gastrointestinal Oncology; Co-Director, Skip Viragh Center for Pancreas Cancer Clinical Research and Patient Care.
Julie Lange, Associate Professor of Surgery, Oncology, and Dermatology.
Linda Lee, Assistant Professor of Medicine.
Susan W. Lehmann, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Founding Director and Medical Director of the Geriatric Psychiatry Day Hospital; Director of the Geriatric Psychiatry Outpatient Clinic; Director of the Psychiatry Clerkship; Director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry.
Kristen Nelson, Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology & Critical Care Medicine; Director of Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care.
Richard J. Redett, Associate Professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery; Director of the Cleft and Craniofacial Center, Facial Pain Paralysis Center, and Pediatric Plastic Surgery.
Daniel Sciubba, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Orthopedic Surgery, Oncology, and Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences.
Deborah Sellmeyer, Associate Professor of Medicine; Medical Director of the Metabolic Bone Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview.
Don Willett August 2nd, 2015
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