The Johns Hopkins Center for Innovative Medicine

Aiming Higher: Raising the Bar for Clinical Excellence in Academic Medicine

There are two important milestones of our academic year: The Miller-Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence Symposium and The Miller Lecture. And this year, both of those events occurred in one special combined program. It was a great day - a celebration of the very best things about academic medicine, marked by the induction of three new members into the Academy.

Read more about the Symposium and Lecture.

View the Summer 2011 Issue of Breakthrough

The Aliki Initiative: Teach a Man to Fish

How did Aliki doctors achieve dramatically low rates of hospital readmission for patients with heart failure? By teaching them how to take care of themselves. 

What is it about congestive heart failure that makes people who have it keep needing to go back to the hospital? The readmission rates are high nationwide. It may be easier to understand why if, for a moment, we picture ourselves in the hospital slippers of someone who has this condition.

Read More

Team's Discovery Links Statins to Immune System Reaction, Muscle Damage

With momentum generated by sharp observation, creative thinking and plain old hard work, scientists in The Johns Hopkins Myositis Center have discovered a rare, potentially dangerous side effect of statins, drugs used to lower cholesterol for millions of people. 

Myositis is an inflammation of the muscles; it can have many causes and can range from mild to severe. The immune system is often involved - which means that the body is mounting a defense to something it perceives as the enemy - but even this response differs from person to person, at the most basic levels.

Read More