David B. Hellmann,
MD, MACP
As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Center for Innovative Medicine, I’m proud to bring you this special edition of CIM Breakthrough, which is chock-full of more stories than ever about the extraordinary people and programs that have coalesced under CIM’s umbrella to dramatically improve patient care at Johns Hopkins — and around the world.
So much has happened at CIM over these two decades, and it’s impossible to capture every seminal moment in these 48 pages. Instead, in keeping with the theme of 20 years, we’ve captured 20 key accomplishments that exemplify work unfolding within areas key to CIM’s mission: clinical excellence, humanizing medicine, healthier aging, pioneering research and making medicine a public trust.
The scope of this work is breathtaking, and I am humbled to bear witness to the way our initial founding objective — to bring the best minds together to make medicine better, day by day, year by year — has expanded in scope. From CIM’s origins as a think tank at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, we have grown into a universitywide enterprise that now serves as a model for cross-disciplinary academic collaboration.
How have we accomplished this? That’s a question I’ve given a lot of thought to of late. As a native of Kentucky, I grew up when Col. Sanders was hawking his Kentucky Fried Chicken all over the world by claiming that it had a unique taste thanks to his “secret recipe of 23 herbs and spices!” But unlike Col. Sanders, I am happy to spill the beans about the “secret sauce” that has made the Center for Innovative Medicine so impactful.
First, from the very beginning, with the encouragement of then Johns Hopkins University President Bill Brody, we aimed high. Borrowing from the mission of Johns Hopkins — which from its founding has sought to revolutionize teaching, research and clinical care — we’ve reached for the stars. Modeled as well on President John F. Kennedy’s bold proclamation in 1962 that the United States would send a man to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was very difficult, CIM’s aspirational goal of making medicine a better public trust has galvanized our best people, stimulated their most inspiring ideas, and unleashed their undaunted efforts. So, for example, in establishing the Miller Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence to nurture and reward superlative doctors, the Academy’s founders developed a research-based process for measuring excellence that has become the standard not just at Johns Hopkins, but also at several important academic medical centers around the country. And in launching the Aliki Initiative to improve the way young doctors can be trained to provide patients with more humanized care, we didn’t limit the reach to the Department of Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview. Today, it’s estimated that residents trained through the Aliki initiative have touched the lives of nearly 1 million patients. What’s more, the Aliki Initiative has inspired creation of CIM’s far-reaching new Initiative for Humanizing Medicine.
“In creating opportunities for lawyers to sit alongside Nobel laureates, for nursing leaders to swap ideas with biomedical engineers, we have created a fertile, cross-disciplinary environment that might best be described as ‘Johns Hopkins without borders.’”
Second, with our clarion call for big ideas that will change medicine and improve the patient experience, we’ve extended a wide welcome to big thinkers of every stripe, not just doctors and researchers, and not just members of one department. Through our CIM Seminars, Miller Lectures, book clubs and annual retreats, we’ve brought together brilliant minds from business, nursing, public health, engineering and more to brainstorm creative solutions to some of the biggest challenges in health care today. In creating opportunities for lawyers to sit alongside Nobel laureates, for nursing leaders to swap ideas with biomedical engineers, we have created a fertile, cross-disciplinary environment that might best be described as “Johns Hopkins without borders.”
Thirdly, thanks to the incredible generosity of our donors and the visionary leadership and philanthropy of my partner Stephanie Cooper Greenberg, chair of our International Advisory Board, we have committed to inspiring and treasuring Johns Hopkins’ most promising clinicians and researchers. In today’s cash-strapped world of academic medicine, it’s never been more difficult for junior researchers to procure funding from agencies like the National Institutes of Health. Time and again, CIM donors have stepped up to change that grim equation — to support the people whose big ideas have gone on to change the standard of care for a wide range of debilitating diseases.
Of course, the final ingredient to the secret sauce, that one that binds the other three together, has been our shared commitment at CIM to listen to our patients. It is only by keeping patients at the center of everything we do that we can succeed in our mission to make medicine a public trust. While I’m proud of all we’ve accomplished at CIM these past 20 years, I’m even more excited about what’s to come. By staying true to our recipe, I’m confident that CIM will continue its high-flying trajectory, reaching new heights we can’t even imagine today. Thank you so much for your support — and I hope you enjoy the ride!
David B. Hellmann, M.D., M.A.C.P.
Aliki Perroti Professor of Medicine
