The beginning of Medicine Grand Rounds marks a new academic year: new students, housestaff, fellows and faculty. I hope as many of you as possible will attend the first Medicine Grand Rounds where I will review the state of our department, highlight some of our inspiring accomplishments and outline challenges and opportunities for the coming year. Most of all, I want to thank all of you - our faculty, nurses, staff, administrators and learners for your hard work, productivity and selfless dedication to our academic missions.
Working together, we have produced much in the past year, and a summary of some of the major changes and accomplishments follows:
- Gordon Tomaselli will lead the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) for the next 5 years.
- Dan Brennan is the inaugural Medical Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center.
- Mario Molina became the inaugural Osler Medicine Board Chair and seeded these efforts with a $1.5M gift. The board meets biannually to advise and financially support the Osler Residency in order to seize opportunities and remain resilient in the face of future challenges as the preeminent internal medicine residency training program.
- Robert Brodsky leads the new Physician Scientist Pathway.
- The Department of Medicine Civic Engagement Initiative is a continuing effort to improve awareness of diversity, its opportunities, challenges and unmet needs in our department and community through unconscious bias training, surveys measuring cultural competence, clothing and clothing drives and more.
- The Society of Bedside Medicine led by Brian Garibaldi is an international organization dedicated to bedside teaching and improving physical examination and diagnostic skills.
- Paul Scheel stepped down from directing the Division of Nephrology, and Dr. Derek Fine took over as interim director while our search committee works to identify top candidates.
- Ron Langlotz, director of Nursing, has led a successful effort to nearly eliminate travel nurses, in part by establishing a ‘FUN (Functional Unit Nursing) Team’ of departmental clinical nurse educators to float between units that has succeed in improving unit engagement.
- Sanjay Desai (Osler Residency Program Director and Vice Chair for Education) and Carrie Herzke (Associate Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs) recently developed a new staffing model that eliminated situations where a patient bed was available, but lacking an attending physician.
- Our first annual Faculty Orientation led by Dr. Lee Biddison (Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs) and supported by Meredith Brady, Slesha Patel, Christopher Sulmonte and Bernadette Sendon educated new faculty about a broad range of resources and tips for academic success in a single setting.
- Year one for the new departmental compensation model is scheduled to deliver the first productivity-based incentives available, in some form, to nearly all faculty in September. This follows two years of hard work by central and divisional administrators, faculty committees, building new data resources and faculty-accessible portals and vetting by the School of Medicine Compensation Committee.
- Access to grant pre-review is now available for all faculty. Grant pre-review is effective, and is required for faculty who request bridging resources.
Despite broad based challenges for academic medicine nationwide, we met our budget, grew clinical business and realized increases in all major categories of grant funding, including the NIH. Taken together, these are remarkable achievements that speak to the growing efficiency and stalwart efforts of our faculty and administrators.
Looking forward to the new academic year:
- Like most academic departments of medicine, we have held a research day for many years celebrating the wide range of exceptional research that is transacted in our department. Last year, I was struck by the absence of counterpart retreats for our educational and clinical missions. Stay tuned for details on new daylong retreats that will combine work at our East Baltimore and Bayview campuses.
- Last year the dean announced a Joy in Medicine Initiative for the SOM. Dr. Lee Biddison (Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs), Dr. Carrie Herzke (Associate Vice Chair for Inpatient Operations) and Dr. Kimberly Peairs (Associate Vice Chair for Ambulatory Operations) recently completed a survey of our faculty to determine the greatest challenges in delivering clinical care and to set priorities for building tangible responses and resources to improve the work experiences of our busiest clinicians.
- We will continue to expand engagement with new mission and vision statements for the DOM. Dr. Sherita Golden led a team of faculty, nurses and non-clinical DOM employees to design new and over-arching mission and vision statements that would be meaningful to all our employees, and thereby facilitate DOM engagement.
- I am committed to expanding best practices for data curation and analytics Dr. Stuart Ray (Vice Chair for Data Integrity and Analytics) represents our department on SOM committees managing clinical and other data. He will continue to meet with individual faculty, participate in divisional meetings and provide advice on best practices for data management during the coming year.
- Our Faculty Portal will continue to grow in functionality and progress toward providing real time data on financial and work productivity for all DOM faculty.
- Jay Pasricha (Vice Chair for Innovation and Commercialization) has written a white paper that will be used to initiate a SOM-wide discussion concerning the role of intellectual property, patents, licensed inventions and other achievements in the promotions process.
- In July we implemented new ACGME rules for resident and fellow work hours. Dr. Sanjay Desai (Osler Residency Program Director and Vice Chair for Education) chairs the iCOMPARE trial executive committee, which tested the new ACGME duty hour rules against the 2011 rules in the largest trial in internal medicine residencies to date. Both JHH and Bayview participated and are now governed by the new, more flexible rules.
- There were 67 new faculty onboarded via the New Faculty orientation in July.
- We were fortunate to welcome 484 outstanding new interns, residents and fellows.
