It isn’t easy to take established academic medical centers like The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and get them to function as one hospital with two campuses. But if anyone is up to the task, it’s Charles Reuland.

Reuland, who in October was named executive vice president and chief operating officer of both hospitals, has spent 26 years with Johns Hopkins Medicine in a range of administrative positions on both campuses. He arrived in the summer of 1989 as a master’s degree student in health policy and management at what is now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. After considering medical school, Reuland realized that his talents would be put to better use reorganizing systems to allow health professionals to be successful.

Now, he’s spending time doing integrative work across the two campuses while also handling issues local to each medical center. At The Johns Hopkins Hospital, he is setting benchmarks, doing cost analyses, establishing productivity metrics for managing labor, working on capacity and throughput, reviewing business plans for new programs, and recruiting leadership for such areas as perioperative services. At Johns Hopkins Bayview, you’ll find him planning and reorganizing clinical programs and departments.

“I think it’s going very well, in the sense that there are even more opportunities than we thought to act creatively across the campuses,” Reuland says. Ensuring that both campuses are purchasing similar or compatible equipment is one example. Rather than purchasing endoscopy equipment for each campus separately, Reuland assured that the two teams worked together to share the existing equipment and then purchase only what was needed jointly.

“We want to position the academic division to continue to survive and thrive in an environment that’s uncertain,” he says, noting that the evolving Maryland hospital reimbursement system presents opportunity as well as challenge. Part of the work comes down to which programs are best suited to each campus. “A lot of what we do is community medicine for the people who live around these hospitals. We have to do that well and competitively, with great outcomes and low costs. At the same time, we have to establish magnet programs that will attract patients from afar—this is what differentiates Johns Hopkins. We want to be the No. 1 academic delivery system in all of those ways.”

Prior to assuming his current role, Reuland had been executive vice president and chief operating officer for Johns Hopkins Bayview since 2009. Before that, he was chief administrative officer for the Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Additionally, he held positions in managed care contracting, social work and patient relations.

Reuland has served as a consultant to other academic medical centers, has been an author and reviewer for the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and continues to serve in various state committees for the Maryland Hospital Association and the Health Services Cost Review Commission.