A renowned pulmonologist and critical care physician, Brian Garibaldi has directed the Johns Hopkins Biocontainment Unit and the Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine Center of Excellence for COVID-19. But some of his most powerful work has been as a physician educator and tireless advocate for the revival of a once sacrosanct ideal — that learning and developing excellent bedside skills is essential to great patient-centered care.
It is also essential to physician morale. “No one becomes a doctor because they want to spend their time being a computer sleuth,” he says, pointing to studies showing that physicians spend more than half of their time on the computer and only about 13% with patients.
In 2016, Garibaldi co-founded the Society of Bedside Medicine, a global initiative that, among other things, supports a bedside medicine fellowship at Hopkins and other institutions. And his appointment in 2018 as the Douglas Carroll, MD CIM Scholar — funded to honor the legendary Hopkins bedside clinician by his daughter, Susan Immelt, and her husband, Stephen — has helped fuel his mission of reinvigorating the Hopkins culture of bedside medicine.
“Because we don’t spend a lot of time in the presence of patients and their families, fundamental clinical skills — such as how to conduct a physical exam and how to talk to patients — are in decline.” – Brian Garibaldi
It helped support his expansion of the clinical skills curriculum he’d developed for the Osler Medical Residency Program to the Bayview Medical Residency Program as well as his creation of a novel bedside clinical skills assessment program. “Because we don’t spend a lot of time in the presence of patients and their families, fundamental clinical skills — such as how to conduct a physical exam and how to talk to patients — are in decline.”
Garibaldi believes that decline can be reversed — “by building back time at the bedside” using tools like AI to make the electronic medical record more navigable and point-of-care testing devices like ultrasound that require close physical engagement with patients. “And we have to build back a culture where assessment of a physician’s skills is part of all levels of training,” he says.
On Sept. 1, 2024, Garibaldi left Hopkins to become the Charles Horace Mayo Professor of Medicine and inaugural director of the new Center for Bedside Medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. His legacy at Hopkins includes the now well-established bedside medicine curriculum, the clinical skills assessment program, and the hundreds of students, residents, fellows and faculty who have participated.
