Play Video:
2017 Innovations in Clinical Care Award–Pamela Johnson, M.D., Lenny Feldman, M.D., & Amit Pahwa, M.D
Background
Dr. Pamela T. Johnson is a Professor in the Johns Hopkins Medicine Department of Radiology, where she is Vice Chair of Quality and Safety, and holds joint appointments in Oncology and Urology. Her area of expertise is Body CT and her research interests include protocol design to optimize multidetector row CT image quality and interpretative performance improvement for vascular and oncologic diagnostic imaging.
Dr. Johnson is the vice president of care transformation for the Johns Hopkins Health System. In this role, she builds on build on the success of our existing provider-led initiatives to improve the efficacy, consistency and efficiency of care delivery. The health system care transformation mission is aligned with multiple arms of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Innovation 2023 strategic plan: Aim for Precision in Everything We do, Improve the Quality and Affordability of Health Care, Make Hopkins Easy and Work Like One Organization.
Dr. Johnson has been a passionate advocate of patient-centered, quality-driven health care refinement for our health system. With faculty from departments of medicine and pathology, she co-directs the JHHS high value care committee, which has safely reduced unnecessary labs, imaging tests, and medications to avoid nearly $10 million in charges to payers and patients since FY2017. Their work was recognized by the Johns Hopkins Hospital 2017 Innovations in Clinical Care award and the Society of Hospital Medicine 2018 Excellence in Quality Improvement Teamwork award. Pamela and Rebecca Stone, M.D. are directing the Providers Aligned in Care Transformation (PACT) initiative, which systemically engages care delivery teams to design and implement strategies that improve consistency, patient outcomes and clinician satisfaction.
In 2019, Pamela established the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as one of 22 provider-led entities in the US approved by CMS to write appropriate use criteria (AUC) for the Protecting Access to Medicare Act advanced imaging regulation. Pamela leads a large team of clinicians who design evidence-based guidelines in the electronic medical record to optimize patient outcomes and resource utilization, while fulfilling CMS’ requirements for advanced imaging clinical decision support.
Nationally, she is the founder and co-director of the High Value Practice Academic Alliance (www.hvpaa.org), a consortium of >100 academic medical centers collaborating on high value care quality improvement, research and education. Dr. Johnson also chairs the American College of Radiology Choosing Wisely® Committee.
Dr. Johnson graduated Cum Laude from Harvard University in 1987 and earned her medical degree as a member of AOA from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA in 1991. She completed her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was elected Chief Resident and performed a fellowship in ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), and magnetic image resonance imaging (MRI) at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
In 2019, the Center for Innovative Medicine selected her as the Stanley Levenson Scholar and effective July 2020, Pamela is the inaugural recipient of the Sheldon B. Bearman, M.D. Endowed Professorship in Radiology.