Innovations Stories

Here is a selection of stories from Johns Hopkins Medicine publications about innovations that have improved patient care.

Beyond the Abyss
When the Moore Clinic opened for AIDS patients in the early 1980s, the unit felt like a hospice. Now it’s helping a growing clientele to manage a lifelong nuisance...

Synergy S Hits the Spot
Tumors once considered off-limits for radiosurgery are no longer so, thanks to new technology harnessed by Johns Hopkins radiation oncologists…

The Stealth of Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic cancer’s furtiveness is what makes it so deadly: Symptoms of the disease rarely emerge until it is nearly impossible to eradicate…
When Prostate Removal Goes High Tech
It’s one thing to learn robotic-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy. It’s quite another to perform the operation in the department where your mentor is Patrick Walsh, the surgeon who proved to the world that a cancerous prostate can be removed without destroying the nerves that govern erections and urinary control...
Pancreatic Cancer’s Enemy Number One
John Cameron has dedicated his 33-year career at The Johns Hopkins Hospital to continually refining—even perfecting—one of surgery’s riskiest procedures...

Change of Heart
With cardiac bypass operations on the wane, three young surgeons here are using techniques straight out of science fiction to attack other once-fatal heart maladies…
Remaking Hearts
Just a few months after beginning the first clinical trial in the United States using donor stem cells to repair muscle damaged by a heart attack, researchers have shown that one day damaged heart tissue could be regenerated with a patient’s own stem cells…

Better Odds for Kidneys
It’s no secret that the number of people living with renal failure far outstrips the supply of cadaver donor kidneys. Some 66,000 patients are on the transplant waiting list, and for more than 5,000 of them, waiting is deadly…

Gastric Bypass Bonus
When surgeon Michael Schweitzer began performing the laparoscopic gastric bypass three years ago, he was certain the procedure would offer morbidly obese patients an easier operation for dropping weight...

Scoping Out Pancreatic Cancer's Precursors
At 56, the New Jersey salesman appeared to be in fine health. He’d stopped smoking 10 years ago and had no symptoms to complain of. What brought him to gastroenterologist Mimi Canto was his family history. Not only was he of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, but his father, his father’s brother and his first cousin had all died of pancreatic cancer...
Trimming the Wait List
When the 65-year-old man’s liver began to fail, his physicians weighed dwindling options. Dreading the chronically long waiting list for liver transplants, the physicians had been searching for new ways to increase the organ pool. They’d developed a growing suspicion that the waiting list for viable livers could be ramatically shortened...

The Making of a Phenom
Connie Trimble has acquired headliner status for her cervical cancer research, but she sees herself as a nerd toting a floppy backpack. How did she get here?...

Opening Airways with Minimally Invasive Technique
Up until a decade ago, doctors had few treatment options for those with advanced lung disease. Patients who wanted to breathe properly often had no choice but to undergo invasive, complex surgeries or take slow-acting medications…

Belzberg Saves a Youthful Leg
Last April, two weeks into his tour in Iraq near the Syrian border, 23-year-old Derrick Goodrich was hit by a bullet from close range… “They told me amputation and a prosthesis would make it easier for me to get around,” Goodrich says. But the young soldier wanted a second opinion…

Got Evidence
Hopkins nurses are uncovering the practices that produce better patient outcomes—and helping to make them standards of care...

Line of Defense
From taking their place at decision-making tables to teaming up directly with executives, bedside nurses are forging leadership roles in the battle to deliver top-notch, cost-effective and patient-protective care...
Total Care Management
The premise of the “total care management” model is to make everyone who touches patients and their families a vital link in delivering efficient medical treatment, relying on nurses to provide the care coordination...

Surgery That Restores a Smile
Facial plastic surgeons Patrick Byrne and Kofi Boahene have addressed the most troubling aspect of facial paralysis—the inability to smile—by developing a new procedure…

Better Zzzzs
The Pillar Implant is gaining traction as an effective weapon for reducing snoring—and preserving marriages.

Safety Reducing Spinal Fluid Leakage after Removal of Acoustic Neuromas
Great advances have been made in the microsurgical technique of removing acoustic neuromas, but cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) rhinorrhea had been—until recently—one of the few remaining sources of perioperative morbidity...
Oropharynx Cancer Responds Well to Neck Dissection with Radiotherapy
Many methods are used to treat oropharynx squamous cell carcinoma. Patients with small primary tumors (T1-T2) without nodal metastasis will have similar outcomes in terms of local control and disease-free survival with either surgery alone or radiation therapy alone...
Reducing Severity of Percutanous Tracheostomy Complications
Johns Hopkins otolaryngologists have led efforts to standardize the protocol for performing percutaneous dilatational tracheostomy (PDT) on ICU patients...
A Talk Before Cutting
It typically takes about two minutes. The operating team gathers around an anesthetized patient and the head surgeon begins. “My name’s Rich Schulick”…
A Remedy of Errors
Out of a deadly medical mistake at Hopkins Hospital sprang a patient-safety effort that has united a bereaved parent with malpractice lawyers, physicians and nurses…

Swallow for the Camera
If he had to, Gerard Mullin could diagnose an active GI bleed from a remote roadside rest strop, even as his patient lay on an emergency gurney miles away. The distressed patient would swallow a pill the size of a multivitamin—but armed with a fancy camera at one end—and within minutes Mullin could begin tracking what the camera-equipped pill “sees” on its journey through the patient’s digestive tract.

Doctor Click
The call came in on Friday night. A 2.2-pound preemie with a failing heart, failing lungs and failing kidneys was inbound to the Hopkins NICU…
Why the Robot?
As surgeons become ever more comfortable with solving complex problems through the use of robots (robotic surgery), Stephen Yang’s biggest question is how far the technology can go in cancer operations...
More Sophisticated Pain Relief
Conrad Potemra, a 55-year-old farmer in rural Poolesville, Md., has learned something interesting about surgery: An operation can fail, but the outcome still can be successful...