Integrating Our Services Within Johns Hopkins Medicine and Beyond

Dear Colleagues,

It is fitting that the 2017 fiscal year began with such a rewarding accomplishment: full implementation of Epic, our electronic medical record system, across Johns Hopkins Medicine. Our three-year rollout began with our ambulatory units and was complete when Epic went live at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in July. We once again would like to say thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. We are sincerely grateful for all the time you spent getting ready for Epic on top of your existing workloads. A unified health record is the backbone of our effort to have an integrated health system. It will help us deliver the best possible care to our patients by improving communication among our providers and by involving patients in their own care through MyChart.

Epic is just one initiative to improve integration as part of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Strategic Plan. In addition to this project, our strategy involves attracting more patients to our health system, exploring meaningful business relationships with other organizations and advancing our ability to provide high-value, efficient care to our patients.

Oncology Services

With the increasing demand for advanced approaches to cancer care in the national capital region (NCR), Johns Hopkins Medicine, through the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, is integrating our excellent oncology services for patients at Sibley Memorial Hospital and Suburban Hospital. This move will make innovative treatment options more accessible for patients and families. For instance, Johns Hopkins and Children's National Health System opened a joint pediatric radiation oncology program at Sibley, where the first patient was treated in July. A new and expanded oncology clinic with 34 private infusion rooms also recently opened at Sibley. As the rest of the new Sibley Memorial Hospital opens this fall, a dedicated inpatient oncology unit will allow for fully coordinated care for acutely ill patients. We expect that in 2019 at Sibley, cancer patients in the NCR suffering from certain complex cancers will be able to take advantage of advanced proton beam therapy, which targets a tumor with minimal impact to surrounding tissue. 

Access

In a competitive health care landscape, we continue to expand our insurance offerings as well. Advantage MD, Johns Hopkins' Medicare Advantage plan for seniors, launched in January and now has more than 4,300 members. As you know, Medicare Advantage is a federally sponsored program that provides managed health care benefits to people eligible for Medicare.

Additionally, Johns Hopkins' Employer Health Plan (EHP), the insurance plan of choice for thousands of Johns Hopkins Medicine employees, has added Sibley Memorial Hospital and Anne Arundel Medical Center as new clients this year. This brings the number of EHP subscribers to over 60,000.

In the "service line" approach to patient care, hospitals reorganize treatment around the disease category (for example, cancer) rather than the clinical specialty (for example, radiology) in an attempt to deliver more tightly coordinated care across the continuum. At Johns Hopkins Medicine, we are growing our service lines to respond to high consumer demand for certain treatments and to enhance the patient experience. As our recently appointed vice president for interdisciplinary patient care, Dr. Theodore DeWeese is working with directors to develop new service lines, such as transplant and musculoskeletal.

Population Health

The Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission recently sought proposals for new programs that would coordinate care for patients with the most complex needs through partnerships among hospitals and organizations that might otherwise act as competitors in a given region. Of the nine partnerships the commission has opted to fund, Johns Hopkins Medicine is involved in three: The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center are working with the Community Health Partnership in Baltimore City, Howard County General Hospital is involved with the Howard County Regional Partnership, and Suburban Hospital is a partner in the Nexus Montgomery collaborative.

Home Health Care Services

We continue to look for ways to make our clinical expertise more accessible outside the hospital. As the preferred home care provider for our insurance products, Johns Hopkins Home Care Group is working with Johns Hopkins HealthCare to meet the home health, infusion and home medical equipment needs of patients in an expanded geographic footprint that extends into Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia. 

Home Care is also collaborating with our hospitals and Johns Hopkins Community Physicians to help manage infusion care coordination for patients across the system as well as collaborating with Potomac Home Health Care, a nonprofit joint venture of Suburban Hospital and Sibley Memorial Hospital, to develop enhanced home-based services—such as oncology infusions, home health, palliative care, medical equipment and pain management—for Johns Hopkins oncology and transplant patients in the NCR.

In the meantime, you can share your thoughts and ideas on this and other components of the Strategic Plan at strategicplan@jhmi.edu.

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