Johns Hopkins Medicine and Applied Physics Laboratory Join Forces to Revolutionize Precision Medicine

To the Johns Hopkins Medicine community

Dear Colleagues,

One of the most exciting developments in health care today is precision medicine—also known as personalized medicine—which uses information from a patient’s genetic makeup, family history and other measurements to improve diagnosis and tailor treatment.

Johns Hopkins Medicine's initiative to implement precision medicine is called Johns Hopkins inHealth. We believe our faculty and staff members’ extraordinary commitment to this effort will help us achieve quicker diagnoses, more advanced treatments and healthier outcomes for all of our patients.

We are pleased to announce today that Johns Hopkins Medicine is launching a partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) that will add considerable expertise to our precision medicine initiative and revolutionize how we practice medicine. APL has a history of applying technology to solve critical challenges. Now, as part of its new National Health Mission Area, APL will also focus on capabilities to improve health and health care.

As part of this effort, Johns Hopkins Medicine initially aims to establish eight precision medicine centers of excellence this year to highlight areas where the newest technologies and measurement tools can be applied to improve patient care. The centers will focus on a number of different conditions, including heart failure, genetics, multiple sclerosis, arrhythmias and prostate cancer, which have similar challenges in diagnosis. With the use of new measurement tools and data analytics, patients can be better divided into distinct subgroups, which will enable physicians to apply more precise treatments.

Because the collaboration couples Johns Hopkins Medicine’s high-quality medical care and innovation with APL's rigorous data analytics and systems engineering expertise, we expect the partnership will have a profound impact on our approach to precision medicine. Together we will create a learning health system that provides a unique framework for meshing clinical care and discovery.

We hope you are as excited as we are about the many ways Johns Hopkins inHealth will benefit medicine and the patients we serve. Many of our researchers and clinicians are already making headway in this area, and we are poised to set the standard of excellence in precision medicine.

To learn more about Johns Hopkins inHealth, please watch this two-minute video and visit the website at hopkinsmedicine.org/inhealth.

Sincerely,
Paul B. Rothman, M.D.
Dean of the Medical Faculty
CEO, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Ronald R. Peterson
President, Johns Hopkins Health System
EVP, Johns Hopkins Medicine