Impact Report | Fiscal Years 2015–2016
Johns Hopkins Medicine International serves as the global ambassador of the Johns Hopkins Medicine mission by providing patient-centered care for diverse populations and sustainable, innovative collaborations that raise the standard of health care around the world.
Working closely with our colleagues across Johns Hopkins, we have the remarkable opportunity to expand our mission's impact to people here and abroad. Below you will learn how our transformative work is benefiting medical educators and their students, up-and-coming health care leaders, partners in research and discovery, our own faculty members, and, most importantly, patients and families across the globe.
Download the entire Johns Hopkins Medicine International FY15-FY16 Impact Report
We serve as connectors, convening the best minds and the most innovative ideas, extending Johns Hopkins Medicine expertise to affiliates around the globe to tackle the toughest problems in health care.
Readying Al Rahba Hospital for a Large-Scale Disaster
As the night and day shifts are about to change on a December morning at Al Rahba Hospital in the United Arab Emirates, the staff learns of a multivehicle crash sending 60 people with a wide array of injuries to the emergency department. Overhead messages alert staff: “This is a drill.”
Physicians and nurses spring into action, putting critical areas to the test: mass casualty notification systems, triage assessments, inventory of resources and operating room capacity.
Johns Hopkins Medicine International experts connected the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response with the hospital to plan the comprehensive drill. We served as observers during the drill and helped compile recommendations to transfer into action.
Introducing a Population Health Approach to Lower Costs in Bermuda
The Argus Group turned to Johns Hopkins for support in targeting rising health care costs in Bermuda. Argus provides insurance to one out of every three Bermudians. Through an agreement signed in 2014, we connected Argus’ subsidiary Bermuda Life Insurance Company Ltd. with Johns Hopkins HealthCare (JHHC) to customize our population health-based approach to reduce costs by supporting those individuals at highest risk.
After using JHHC’s analytical tools, Argus now understands its clientele’s most prevalent issues. These insights inform education campaigns and a case management program co-developed with JHHC.
Bermuda Life’s new head of population health and case manager trained for two weeks in Baltimore, establishing relationships with JHHC counterparts. Bermuda Life helped customize condition-specific interventions already in use at Johns Hopkins. These became fundamental elements of its case management program, which began enrolling members in 2016.
Inspiring Nursing Collaboration in Latin America
For each of the last 10 years, we convened leaders from across Johns Hopkins and our affiliates at the Johns Hopkins Medicine International Partners Forum to create a space for collaborative problem-solving and to forge ongoing relationships.
The chief nursing officers from our five Latin American hospital affiliates had such fruitful discussions at Partners Forum in 2015 that they decided to continue their conversations on a regular basis. They soon went from discussing safety issues over quarterly videoconference sessions to attending the first-ever Johns Hopkins Medicine International-organized Americas Regional Meeting in June 2016.
The small, region-specific Partners Forum brought together executive leaders from our affiliates in The Americas to discuss outcomes of a variety of care efforts and exchange insights on wide-ranging patient and health care topics.
Elevating Care
There are myriad paths toward better clinical care, and we continue to forge new ones: Enabling firsts. Introducing fields of care. By going beyond knowledge-sharing, we help our affiliates tailor Johns Hopkins best practices for their settings.
Advancing Robotic Surgery in the Kingdom
Urologists at Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare performed the first robotic surgery there — and in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — using the technologically advanced daVinci Xi Surgical System.
A leading-edge surgical tool, the robot translates the motion of a surgeon’s hand into the precise movements of tiny instruments inside a patient’s body. Johns Hopkins experts recommended the robot’s purchase and helped prepare the facility needed to house it.
We then paired Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare urologist Tareq Al-Tartir with Mohamad Allaf, The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s director of minimally invasive and robotic urologic surgery, to devise and implement a plan for building a comprehensive robotic surgery program at Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare.
Together, Al-Tartir and Allaf considered what additional equipment and resources were needed at Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare and what processes the staff there would follow, and they established and trained a multidisciplinary team to conduct these surgeries.
Not only can Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare patients now receive minimally invasive urologic treatment close to home, but this program also serves as a road map for Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare to develop robotic programs in general surgery and gynecology, which will lead to shorter hospital stays and less pain for patients.
Innovating Chemotherapy Delivery
When cancer is looming, there’s no time to wait for the most cutting-edge, targeted drugs. Yet the high-touch, human-driven process for preparing and checking the safety of chemotherapy bags can cause significant delays.
A team at Johns Hopkins Singapore, our 30-bed oncology joint venture in the Far East, was convinced there was a better way. Team members linked up with local technical experts at Temasek Polytechnic to explore videoconferencing as an option to save precious time in verifying chemotherapy cocktails.
As Johns Hopkins Singapore staff members created a workflow and thoughtfully redesigned drug labels to include scannable bar codes, Temasek worked out the technical requirements. Out of 196 trials, the internet-enabled camera accurately scanned drug bar codes 95.4 percent of the time on the first try and 100 percent on the second.
These results justify investing in a comprehensive and secure video verification system to make ordering and preparing chemotherapy more efficient than ever before.
Championing Patients
Patients travel to Johns Hopkins Medicine for leading-edge health care. We match that expertise in our support. Our dedication propels us to be industry leaders, relentlessly focused on providing our patients with the best possible experience.
Launching a Medical Home for International Patients
We pride ourselves on caring for our international patients before, during and after their visit to Johns Hopkins Medicine. In 2015, we opened a clinic at Green Spring Station that helps us fulfill that promise, enhancing the experience for patients identified as needing an additional layer of support and the specialists who treat them.
The clinic had more than 500 visits in the first year. The Green Spring Station team expanded so we can broaden the focus beyond "complex" patients--those who require the expertise of multiple specialists--and better support more of our patients who choose to travel from around the world to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Developing Leaders
Engaging and Educating Communities Worldwide
Through the Distinguished Faculty Visit Program at Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare, John Ingari, an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in hand surgery, and 15 other distinguished Johns Hopkins faculty leaders so far have traveled to Saudi Arabia to give Grand Rounds to Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare clinicians, review difficult cases, provide consultation to their physician peers and present lectures to Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare community members.
Building Chilean Nurses’ Leadership Skills
Advancing nursing practice is a key way we develop health care leaders. As one example, 30 nurse leaders from Clínica Las Condes in Chile completed a nearly yearlong professional development initiative, building their skills in areas like communication, performance management and quality measurement. Johns Hopkins experts delivered lectures and workshops through videoconference and one in-person session. These nurse leaders are now applying what they learned to critical issues at their hospital, including improving discharge planning and increasing compliance with pressure ulcer-reducing protocols.
Fueling Discovery
Promoting Collaborative Research with Global Affiliates
Our first scholarly paper with our joint venture Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare in Saudi Arabia and a joint study with Johns Hopkins Medicine International affiliate Hospital Moinhos de Vento reveal the rich potential of the collaborative research Johns Hopkins conducts around the world.
Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare clinical researchers Abdulrazack Amir and Salwa Sheikh and Johns Hopkins urologists Brian Matlaga and Justin Ziemba will present their paper, “Kidney Stone Composition in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” at the 34th World Congress of Endourology, the largest international meeting on minimally invasive urologic surgery.
In Brazil, a recent three-day event inspired clinicians at Hospital Moinhos de Vento and Johns Hopkins to partner on a research project. Matlaga and Ziemba, along with urology resident Wesley Ludwig, again engaged global colleagues in an important joint study, this time with Eduardo Carvalhal, chief of urology at Hospital Moinhos de Vento, and urologist Leticia Ruiz from Hospital Punta Pacífica, a Johns Hopkins Medicine International affiliate in Panama. They presented their research at the American Urological Association’s annual meeting in May 2016 and will be turning their study into a manuscript for publication.
Giving Back
Funding Medical Students from 10 Countries
Four years ago, we established a need-based scholarship for international students pursuing their medical degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Today, the Paul S. Lietman Johns Hopkins Medicine International Scholarship is named for one our earliest faculty champions.
The 2015 slate of recipients hail from 10 countries across five continents. We invited them to our office in Baltimore, Maryland, December 2015 to meet Johns Hopkins Medicine International leaders and members of the Lietman family. These future physician leaders may one day choose to collaborate with Johns Hopkins Medicine International as we extend the Johns Hopkins mission around the globe. Learn more about each of the scholars.