Johns Hopkins Hospital: Medical Excellence Through Integration, Essay Example

Johns Hopkins hospital stands as an enduring example of the entrepreneurial American spirit, and as a monument to public/private cooperation for the greater good. The institution exists as the teaching hospital and medical research facility operated by and for the John Hopkins School of Medicine. In order to examine the hospital from a managerial perspective, it must be correctly situated as one arm of the “$5 billion enterprise…the broad, integrated Johns Hopkins Health System” (Hopkins Medicine 2011).

The hospital’s stated mission is largely unchanged from its founder’s original vision, and reads as follows:

“The mission of The Johns Hopkins Hospital is to improve the health of the community and the world by setting the standard of excellence in patient care. Diverse and inclusive, The Johns Hopkins Hospital in collaboration with the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University supports medical education and research, and provides innovative patient-centered care to prevent, diagnose and treat human illness” (Hopkins Medicine 2011)

Here, the hospital’s goals and objectives are highlighted: To better the “health of the community and the world” through a synergetic approach that involves both medical education and “innovative patient-centered care”. Although these goals are demanding, Johns Hopkins Hospital has set the highest standard in medical practice since its inception and maintains that standard today.

Countless groundbreaking achievements and advances in medical science and practice indicate the success of Johns Hopkins Hospital. For example, founding surgeon William Halsted gained worldwide recognition for modernizing the process of radical mastectomy in the previous century (Sakorafas 2008), while the Hospital was the first in the country to perform a successful sex-change operation at its groundbreaking Gender Identity Clinic in 1966 (Wexler 2007).

How, though, is such a high level of success continually achieved by the Hospital? The answer is through a threefold, synergetic integration of teaching, care-provision and research. The hospital acts as the teaching and research hospital for Johns Hopkins University Medical School. This ensures a consistent supply of two key resources. The first is medical students, who complete their training at the hospital, thereby guaranteeing for the hospital a continued flow of the best-educated new medical professionals in the world. These doctors become physicians, surgeons and researchers, and later, some become professors. This association intimately links a top-tier educational institution with a top-tier public health service and research institution (US News: Health 2011) and guarantees the flow of the second key resource: external funding. John Hopkins Hospital received over $400 million in federal grant money in 2009 alone, more than any other medical school in the U.S. (Fast Facts, Hopkins Medicine 2011).

This strategy exists entirely in its implementation: as stated, medical students must complete their residency at Hopkins Hospital to earn their degree; researchers affiliated with the school get access to state of the art equipment and a continual flow of real-time case studies in the form the hospital’s patient clientele. These two guarantors create a state of mutual dependence, or represent a case of carefully developed and intentionally limited vertical integration between the school, the hospital and the laboratory, depending on one’s perspective.

References

John Hopkins Medicine (2011). Mission, Home Page, Fast Facts (pamphlet). Retrieved from http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org

Sakorafas, George H (2008). The Origins of Radical Mastecomy, Aorn Journal, Vol. 88 No. 4

US News: Health (2011). John Hopkins Hospital. Retrived from http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals

Wexler, Laura (2007). Identity Crisis, Retrieved from http://www.baltimorestyle.com