New Emory health chief plans to focus on integrated care

The new leader of Emory University’s various health entities sees his appointment as “a great opportunity.”

Dr. Jonathan S. Lewin has been named executive vice president for health affairs, Emory announced Thursday. Lewin, a Johns Hopkins executive, also will serve as executive director for Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center.

Dr. Jonathan Lewin
Dr. Jonathan Lewin

And he will become the new president, CEO and chairman of Emory Healthcare, which has seven hospitals, more than 16,000 employees, and 1,800 physicians in more than 70 specialties.

He will begin his tenure at Emory on Feb. 1.

Lewin, in an interview Friday with Georgia Health News, said a chief goal “is to bring together the different [medical and health] schools and Emory Healthcare into a shared vision of moving forward. The whole is much bigger than the sum of the parts.”

He said he views Emory as “well-suited to be a national leader in terms of being a model of integrated health care delivery.”

Integrated care means guiding patients through their whole medical experience, from physician’s office to (if needed) hospital care, rehabilitation, skilled nursing facility and home care, Lewin said. “It concentrates on the patient. We need to look at everything [from] the patient’s and family’s eyes.”

Lewin currently serves as senior vice president for integrated health care delivery and as co-chair for strategic planning for Johns Hopkins Medicine, a renowned institution in Maryland. He also serves as professor and chair of the Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at Johns Hopkins University as well as the radiologist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

For Emory Healthcare, Lewin’s appointment follow a year of executive changes.

In March, it lost longtime CEO and President John Fox, who left Emory for the same position with a Detroit-based health system. Michael J. Mandl then took over as president and CEO of the university’s health care operations.

When Mandl left those positions for another Emory job, he was replaced by Dr. Michael M.E. Johns, a former Emory executive vice president for health affairs, who agreed to serve as interim vice president, as well as interim leader of Emory Healthcare. Johns himself came to Emory in the mid-1990s from Johns Hopkins.

“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Lewin to the Emory leadership team,” Emory President James W. Wagner said in a statement Thursday. He said Lewin has “an impressive track record of innovative and high-impact research, exceptional patient care and visionary administrative acumen. His insights as a leader, clinician and researcher will benefit our patients, faculty, students and staff, as well as the state of Georgia and beyond.”

Before joining Johns Hopkins, Lewin served in Ohio as the director of the Division of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and vice chairman for research and academic affairs in the Department of Radiology at Case Western Reserve University and the University Hospitals of Cleveland.

Lewin is internationally recognized as a pioneer in interventional and intra-operative MRIs, Emory said.