The idea that medicine is a public trust is foundational at CIM, and it fully informs the work of Aliki Perroti CIM Scholar Panagis Galiatsatos — not only as a deeply empathic physician, but as the award-winning co-founder and co-director of Medicine for the Greater Good (MGG).
“CIM was our first funder, our first advocate,” says Galiatsatos of the program he helped formally establish at Johns Hopkins Bayview in 2013 that promotes community engagement — among Bayview medical residents and other providers, as well as among hundreds of volunteers across Hopkins — as a powerful way to address inequities in health care. “It was clear from the beginning that Dr. Hellmann saw this as a way medicine could have a real impact on people beyond the hospital walls.”
Working with Baltimore City churches, schools and community groups, MGG teams have trained an army of lay health educators, created “caregiver cafes,” staffed health fairs, and organized lice eradication and smoking cessation workshops. Galiatsatos is a lung and critical care specialist who runs the Hopkins Tobacco Treatment Clinic, so MGG launched the Lung Health Ambassador Program to teach middle and high school students about respiratory health, and even how to successfully advocate for public policy changes — like the bill passed by the Maryland state legislature in 2019 to raise the smoking age in the state to 21.
“Our biggest allocation of resources at the moment is collaborating with the many people who are trying to create a sustainable model for the deployment of community health workers (CHWs),” Galiatsatos says. CHWs are professional lay health educators who serve as health care liaisons within their own communities, certified by the state and typically paid.
“The volunteer model is great, but we want people to be able to devote their time to helping their neighbors without worrying about their own income security,” he says.
MGG has made a difference in the lives of thousands of Baltimore residents, not least because of the trust Dr. G., as he is fondly known, and his colleagues have built in the community.
“He was building those bridges by coming, and that meant a lot to us,” the Rev. Ernest King, an early MGG partner and youth advocate at the Poe Homes housing project, once told an interviewer. Trust, King said, is a big issue “in our community because we get a lot by people wanting to bring programs in and… they might stay a month and after they get what they need they leave.” Dr. G stuck to his promises, showed up when he said he would, and just keeps coming. “So we knew he was concerned about our community.”
But MGG has also made a difference in the lives of the Bayview physicians and other health care providers who have participated, Galiatsatos says.
“One of the most rewarding things I hear from my residents, pre-meds and med students who go out and do MGG is, ‘I feel like I’ve made a bigger difference in more lives in a few hours than I ever could as a clinician,’” he says. “Of course, it’s incredibly rewarding to be a clinician, but when you participate in these community engagement efforts, you realize the impact you can have, just spending a few hours working on a project the community has asked us to dive into.”
The mission of Medicine for the Greater Good also resonates with public figures from across the region and around the country. Each year, MGG takes center stage at Johns Hopkins Bayview when the Department of Medicine dedicates an entire session of Medical Grand Rounds to highlight the program’s impact. In 2016, the now late Congressman Elijah Cummings addressed a packed Grossi Auditorium, where he lauded the work of MGG and other Bayview programs in fortifying the communities he represented. In November, the Grammy-winning opera singer Renee Fleming will take the podium to share her support for the program.
Galiatsatos’ long-term vision for MGG is no less than a revolution in the practice of medicine.
“My hope is that the MGG concept becomes commonplace, a new paradigm, and that every health care institution training the next generation of physicians and nurses recognizes that while they need to know the science and medicine, they also need to know the communities where patients are coming from, because that contextual level of interaction will dictate better outcomes.”
