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For Your Health: Ask Be Well!
In the News
Moments that Matter
HIPAA Countdown
Around BIDMC
Honors
Calendar

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A Chat With Paul Levy

It has been just over a year since BIDMC President and CEO Paul Levy arrived and introduced BIDMC’s financial recovery plan. Below, Levy shares his vision for BIDMC’s future:

Now that we have made progress toward financial recovery, what’s next?

We are embarking on a new strategic planning process to determine major areas of focus over the next three to five years. This plan will be different from other strategic planning we have done, since it will be generated from the collective wisdom of the BIDMC staff, with some processing help from consultants at McKinsey and Company. The plan will be based on input from a range of people here at BIDMC and reviewed by a steering committee composed of medical and administrative leadership.

Putting aside longer term strategy, what are key priorities for this year?

Our priorities include fundraising, research, volume and nursing initiatives.

In fundraising, we have recruited a great new senior vice president of development, Kristine Laping, to reenergize our efforts. [See “Around BIDMC.”]

In research, under Chief Academic Officer Jeffrey Flier’s leadership, our research faculty are doing intensive planning, focused on the advantages of assembling disciplinary research programs for specific, hard-to-solve medical problems.

As to volume, meeting our budget depends on achieving projected increases in patient volume for the year. This in turn depends on recruiting enough additional surgeons, maintaining the quantity and quality of our nursing staff and continuing good relations with referring physicians.

Regarding nursing initiatives, I am very pleased with our progress on improving the quality of the nursing experience here through endeavors like our newly enhanced scholarship program and increased opportunities for staff development. Already our retention of nurses is up, and we have recruited 281 nurses this year — well ahead of our goals.

What other challenges are we facing?

Our staff have had to do more work with fewer resources and overcome a sense of uncertainty, but I think that people have recovered their sense of identification, enthusiasm and commitment to the medical center. Now that the financial crisis is mostly past, the two biggest challenges are to avoid becoming complacent and to ensure that we are supportive of one another in our daily activities. It is the nature of organizations that often, after a crisis, people fail to continue supporting each other in the next phase of the recovery. We cannot forget that all we have is each other in making BIDMC great.

Where do you see BIDMC in 2004?

Healthier, stronger and happier! I’m very optimistic.



-Valerie Hope Goldstein


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Published monthly for the people of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to build community, communicate direction, foster pride and recognize accomplishments.

Produced by Beth Israel Deaconess communications, (66)7-7300

director, internal communications:
   Cindy ReVelle
managing editor:
   Valerie Hope Goldstein
layout & design:
   Jen McGrath & Jane Hayward
web layout & design:
   Jim Dwyer
contributing writers:
Anna Kalluri, Bonnie Prescott
contributing photographer: Bruce Wahl



© CareGroup, Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 2003. All rights reserved. Material may be reproduced only with the express written consent of communications.

 

 

 














Technology Ventures:
Opening a World of Opportunity
for BIDMC Research
Marilyn Bernstein, Ginny Thomes, Anita Homer
Above: Technology Ventures staff with dharmas. Seated (l to r): Maria Silveira, Mark Chalek, and Stan Mah, Ph.D. Standing (l to r): Lambert Edelmann, Debra Harvey, Meghan White, Christine Jost, Ph.D., Ted Bale, and Cathy Lenich, Ph.D.

A small Japanese figurine gazes out from a bookshelf in the office of BIDMC’s Chief of Business Ventures Mark Chalek. As a symbol of the beginning of a long and healthy partnership, this “dharma” was presented to BIDMC by Takeda Chemical Industries, Inc., to recognize an important new research collaboration. The medical center and the Japanese pharmaceutical company will investigate the molecular basis of diabetes and obesity and develop new treatments for these widespread metabolic diseases. The three-year research agreement totals $13.7 million, making it one of the largest collaborations in recent years between an industry sponsor and a Boston teaching hospital.

As the dharma attests, BIDMC’s Office of Technology Ventures is in the business of creating successful industry partnerships. These enable the translation of some of BIDMC’s hundreds of scientific discoveries into new drugs and technologies and bring other BIDMC intellectual property, such as health education materials, to the marketplace.

Dharma

The "dharma," pictured here, was presented to BIDMC's Technology Ventures Office by Takeda Chemical Industries. Mark Chalek explains that, according to Japanese tradition, the figurine represents the foundation of a long and successful partnership.

"When our counterparts at Takeda first gave us the dharma, during a business dinner last summer as we neared the end of negotiations, they explained that only the left eye of the figurine had been colored in. That meant that the first stage of our relationship had been sealed, and that we would now have to successfully complete the second phase so that we could fill in the right eye."

Chalek proudly notes that today both of the figurine's eyes are now in place. He adds that larger versions of the Japanese statue that were presented to Jeff Flier and the five BIDMC researchers who are part of the collaboration remain with a single eye - as they await the research team's scientific discoveries on obesity and diabetes.

“When we’re looking for industry partners, our priority isn’t necessarily finding out who has the most cash, but who has the capability to turn our scientists’ discoveries and doctors’ expertise into innovations to help patients,” says Chalek. “We take this responsibility very seriously.”
The nine-member Tech Ventures staff has facilitated more than 2,000 deals over the past four years, averaging between 40 and 50 collaborative research agreements and 30 licensing agreements per year — a phenomenal growth rate of more than 400 percent. Their wide range of responsibilities includes everything from soliciting and screening new inventions to filing patents and developing licensing agreements. Last year, BIDMC revenue from new and existing deals was more than $9.5 million.

“Our staff functions as the business development group for BIDMC,” explains Chalek. “We are involved in any negotiations with private companies in which we have the opportunity to leverage the talents, expertise or tools of BIDMC staff.”

Six BIDMC scientists are involved in the Takeda deal: Chief Academic Officer Jeffrey Flier, M.D., Lewis Cantley, Ph.D., Barbara Kahn, M.D., Joel Elmquist, D.V.M., Ph.D., Bradford Lowell, M.D., Ph.D., and Anthony Hollenberg, M.D. Under the terms of the agreement — which was reached following two years of negotiations — Takeda will have the option to license any inventions of the BIDMC investigators that have been derived as a result of the collaboration. This is the first step on the road to developing new pharmaceutical products. In exchange, BIDMC will, among other benefits, receive the resources to develop important new core research facilities — including proteomics and mass spectrometry facilities — to further advance our medical center’s scientific investigations.

“There is a growing consensus, both inside BIDMC and in the academic and business community, that our Ventures Group is the most sophisticated and successful group in the entire region,” says Flier. “Their contribution to the success of our research enterprise has been nothing short of amazing since they began, virtually from scratch, in 1998.”

While the Tech Ventures staff serves a vital function at BIDMC, Chalek points out, “We’re only as good as the innovations that our scientists and medical staff catalyze. Our job is not to push scientists in a direction that we think will be a good commodity, but to start with our scientists’ discoveries and find ways to successfully bring them to the marketplace.”

To learn more about BIDMC’s research agreement with Takeda, see the BIDMC news Web site on our general portal.


- Bonnie Prescott

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