A Letter from Technology Innovation Center Leadership
Director Dwight Raum and Deputy Director Paul Nagy provide a five-year review on the growth and accomplishments of the Technology Innovation Center.
Johns Hopkins Medicine has contributed much to the practice of medicine over the last century. Recently, medicine’s transformation has accelerated to center on individuals, their wellness, and their health journey. This journey is intertwined with new technologies. In the five years since the Technology Innovation Center (TIC) was created, the center has served as catalyst, convener and crucible, helping to define this future by bringing new information technology into the clinical setting while protecting patient privacy and ensuring patient safety.
Fueled by strategic collaborations internally, locally, and nationally, we’ve trained and connected thousands of innovators, and added value to hundreds of transformative projects. This acceleration is possible through a culture of openness, a focus on user-centered design, and a willingness to explore mutual opportunities with external collaborators.
The impact of TIC’s collaborations spans institutional initiatives and serves national healthcare opportunities, including cross-disciplinary invention, precision medicine, patient data security, and digital health.
The Maryland health information exchange, Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP), partnered with our design team to collect and organize user feedback. This first collaboration led to a redesign of CRISP’s EMR embedded health information application. Through improved user experience, CRISP has increased use by community providers. Building on this first successful collaboration, both TIC and CRISP are exploring projects to improve disease management and progression through visualizations. The application of feedback-informed and adaptive design into CRISP’s development process is key to improving patient care beyond Hopkins, into the Maryland community.
The Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine inHealth initiative is entering its third year in the construction of a secure, cloud-based, data science platform that combines data acquired at the point of care, medical imaging, physiological monitoring, and genomic data. To date there are 5.8 million JH patients, with 150 Million encounters, 75 million medical images, and telemetry from over 2,500 beds on the platform. The platform contains secure analytics and compute environments designed for machine learning on complex medical data. Last year over 4,000 clinical researchers and staff at Johns Hopkins used the analytics tools on the platform. The TIC manages the technology platform and leads project management to help interdisciplinary teams understand and leverage vast new data sets. Researchers can now access health information and tools to provide more individualized treatment and planning for specific patient groups.
In five years, the TIC has built learning communities for over 500 Johns Hopkins faculty and staff. The communities encourage clinicians and software engineers to work together in building novel IT solutions. We’ve trained clinical researchers to take advantage of clinical data science on the precision medicine analytics platform (PMAP) and informaticians to work with our clinical partners in understanding today’s complex clinical requirements.
In 2019 the TIC worked with Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures to win a federal economic development grant for building a digital health innovation ecosystem in the region through an initiative called the Chesapeake Digital Health Exchange. This year, the initiative began work developing a network of influencers, training a strong pipeline of diverse talent, and accelerating commercialization of promising digital health technologies in the region. The initiative serves digital health customers, investors, and entrepreneurs with the goal of making the Chesapeake the premiere region for digital health. Digital health represents immense opportunity as national healthcare costs continue to rise and services consolidate, signaling a need for care delivery outside of the hospital. The Technology Innovation Center is helping to drive that work forward through its insight into technology integration in a health system, and experience with training innovators.
With five years traversed and many important focuses for healthcare transformation already in motion, we’re excited about the road ahead. The TIC pledges to dedicate its time to the most impactful opportunities for improving provider-to-patient care and we hope that you come along for the ride with us.