School of Medicine
Welcome, Dean Rothman!
The School of Medicine welcomes Paul B. Rothman, M.D., as the Frances Watt Baker, M.D., and Lenox D. Baker Jr., M.D. Dean of the Medical Faculty, vice president for medicine of The Johns Hopkins University, and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine. He is the 14th dean of the School of Medicine and the second CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Read Dean/CEO Rothman's biography.
See Dean/CEO Rothman's curriculum vitae.
View the photo gallery of his appointment.
Alumni Update
Improving the Patient Experience Through the Little Comforts
Elizabeth Chabner Thompson, Med '93, launched Bffl Co. – Best Friends For Life – in April 2011. Its first product, the Bffl BagTM, a care bag to improve the patient experience following surgery, began as an idea in her basement. The bag contains wound care supplies and a drain care pack as well as toiletries, note cards, a water bottle, tissues, word games and more - all items someone recovering from surgery may want or need.
She also wondered why patients, despite advances in surgical procedures, were still wearing a 1970s model surgical bra, so she created a new line of surgical bras. In 2010, she developed four bras, one named after herself and the others named for her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, who all battled breast cancer. Thompson had a prophylactic double mastectomy in 2006.
Bffl also makes care bags for post-surgical patients recovering from traumatic brain injury and from ovarian or other women’s cancers and gynecological surgeries. Thompson plans to add a bag for Caesarean section patients and a bag for men recovering from prostate cancer surgery.
“Funny thing,” she said a recent news article. “I went through the surgery because I thought that it would put to rest my overwhelming concern about breast cancer. But it has become the focus of my work and my passion to help others by bringing them the little comforts.”
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Student News
Fighting the Rising Tide of "Cyberchondria"
In June, medical students Craig Monsen and David Do, developers of the mobile and web app Symcat, won $100,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for taking the top prize in a data-focused developer challenge at The Health Datapalooza. Symcat is a symptom checker that asks users what their symptoms are and how long they've been experiencing them, age, gender and family history.
Symcat analyzes the symptoms as well as disease prevalence data from the Centers for Disease Control and other public sources with the goal of helping users figure out what their symptoms mean. Users can click on results for more information; Symcat also asks a set of questions a doctor might ask to identify warning signs. If there is cause for concern, the site will suggest emergency care as well as list nearby hospitals and urgent care centers.
While other sites also aim to give patients relevant healthcare information, Symcat takes a primarily data-driven approach to help individuals from diagnosis to treatment. “The data are out there,” said Monsen. “You just need to be a little crafty to stitch them all together."
Symcat was one of the first startups to come from the New-York based Blueprint Health, a TechStars-affiliated health startup accelerator that provides funding and mentorship.
Monsen and Do met in 2008 as anatomy lab partners where they bonded over their shared passion for engineering projects.
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