May 13, 2011|By Meredith Cohn, The Baltimore Sun
Daniels said Miller has worked to build the Hopkins system through acquisitions and partnerships, and has overseen a building boom on the East Baltimore campus. He's also overhauled the medical school curriculum to include advances in the human genome, brought more diversity into the system and worked to ensure patients' interests were represented in the national health care reform debate, Daniels said.
News of his departure next year brought compliments from others on campus, including from Miller's No. 2, Ronald R. Peterson, president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System and executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine.
He said Miller was the first to hold the position of dean/CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, when the offices of the School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Health System were merged. Peterson said Miller balanced the research-education-clinical care mission "to ensure no one element was subrogated to the other."
Specifically, Peterson said Miller transformed the physical infrastructure in East Baltimore with planning or construction of four major research buildings — The Bunting Family-The Family of Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Building for Cancer Research, The Broadway Research Building, The David H. Koch Cancer Research Building, and The Robert H. and Clarice Smith Building of the Wilmer Eye Institute — an education building — the Armstrong — and a set of towers that will house 560 hospital beds for children and adults when they open next year.
He also added new institutes, including the McKusick Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, the Brain Sciences Institute, the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences and Cell Engineering Institute.
"He will be remembered for the development of an academic regional health care delivery system in the Baltimore/Washington region in recognition of the changes occurring in the marketplace and the need to develop a more highly integrated approach to care delivery with an increasing emphasis on population health management," Peterson said.
On the international front, Miller centralized activities into Johns Hopkins International and established management agreements and partnerships with hospitals in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Patients from as far away as the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the Dominican Republic also are now regularly referred to Hopkins for care.
In 2007, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of United Arab Emirates, gave Hopkins Medicine its largest one-time cash donation to thank the hospital for improving the standard of health care in the UAE. The sum wasn't disclosed, but most of the money will go to the new $1.1 billion patient care towers, as well as cardiovascular research. More of the gift will go to AIDS research at the Johns Hopkins University-Makerere University Collaborative Care Center at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda.
To search for a replacement, Daniels has tapped Francis B. Burch Jr., incoming chair of the board of Johns Hopkins Medicine and co-chairman of the law firm DLA Piper LLP, and Provost Lloyd B. Minor.
Burch said, "Over the last 15 years, Ed Miller has done an extraordinary job in leading the Hopkins Medicine institutions through a period of unprecedented growth and change, while preserving and enhancing their preeminence in the areas of medical research, teaching and patient care. His shoes are indeed large to fill but, because of his efforts, the position of dean/CEO of Hopkins Medicine, in our view, is the single most attractive such position in the world and we are confident that we will find a worthy successor."
