Highmark Health builds on collaboration with Johns Hopkins
Highmark Health’s Allegheny Health Network is strengthening its clinical and research ties with Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, as officials Wednesday announced a new collaboration for gynecologic care and maternal fetal medicine, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung transplantation.
The arrangement builds on AHN’s five-year collaboration with John Hopkins in cancer research and treatment, while underscoring the network’s focus on women and children’s health.
Physician Allan Klapper, chair of AHN’s Women and Children Institute, said Wednesday that the organizations have been working the better part of last year to put the collaboration together.
“The importance of the collaboration is that it will provide our community with our combined expertise and the ability to test out different theories and clinical pathways and models of care that will improve the type of care we provide for our community.”
AHN facilities West Penn Hospital
in Bloomfield, Jefferson Hospital in Jefferson Hills, Forbes Hospital in Monroeville and St. Vincent Hospital in Erie currently deliver about 8,100 newborns each year.
Collaborating with Hopkins and its operations will create a network with double that number, constituting “one of the largest research collaborations nationally” for gynecologic and obstetrical health,” said Dr. Klapper.
Also, Allegheny Health Network patients with advanced lung disease will have a more streamlined access to the Johns Hopkins lung transplant program. It has a 98% one-year survival rate, compared with the 89% survival rate nationally.
Pulmonology Chair Anil Singh said he expects 10-20 local patients may go to Hopkins each year to be evaluated for a lung transplant and perhaps half of those will undergo the procedure.
Because AHN does not offer lung transplantation, Dr. Singh said those patients have been referred to programs such as UPMC and Cleveland Clinic in the past.
With the Hopkins collaboration, patients would not have to repeat certain tests for determining their suitability for transplant as they do now.
Dr. Singh noted lung patients transplanted at Johns Hopkins spend a median 2.8 months awaiting transplant, compared with the national average of 3.1 months. Pre- and post-transplant care will be available at Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side.
On the research side, the two institutions will combine patient interaction data to improve practice standards for treating women and children. The pulmonary
collaboration will be research-focused on treatment of COPD, which affects about 3 million people in the U.S. annually with millions more possibly undiagnosed.
AHN has put added emphasis on women and infants care since opening a new obstetrics and newborn unit at Jefferson Hospital in Jefferson Hills in late 2014.
In 2017, it launched its AHN Women brand, expanding services for women of all ages including a recent focus on helping those diagnosed with postpartum depression. The following year, Allegheny Health Network established its Women and Children Institute.
The emphasis is on care for women and children, Dr. Klapper said, “because women’s health care is so critical to the stability of the family and women in most cases are the primary determiner in terms of where the family seeks its health care.”