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Science in Service
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Medicine
From the President
2025 Annual Metrics
Cycle of Translation
result
2040 Vision For Impact
A true leader’s legacy is not what they accomplish alone, but the wisdom, knowledge and passion they pass on to those who follow.
Since its founding in 2004, the Houston Methodist Academic Institute has achieved remarkable growth. Annually, it now secures $90M in extramural funding, produces 2,000 publications, and manages 689 active clinical trials. The academic workforce has expanded to 2,300 credentialed researchers, 815 faculty members, and 369 ACGME residents and fellows across 52 accredited programs. This success was driven by three phases of strategic planning.
Initial Vision 2010: Established academic infrastructure, accreditations and academic affiliations.
Strategic Plan 2020: Developed research and education programs to advance restorative medicine, precision medicine, outcomes research, clinical research and innovative education.
2040 Vision Impact Plan: Delivers national leadership and impact by combining clinical and translational strengths with sea changes in artificial intelligence and bioengineering to transform medicine via six initiatives for transforming care now and transforming care tomorrow.
By 2024, Houston Methodist surpassed its ambitious 2030 targets for U.S. News & World Report rankings, total grant funding, technology transfer revenue and clinical trials set in 2020. To reset these goals and plan for the next five years, 140 faculty and staff collaborated to assess progress and chart the future.
The Houston Methodist Academic Institute continues a trajectory of success that followed from investing in the visionary ideas of our Centers of Excellence. They delivered by increasing our grant funding from $10M annually to more than $100M annually over 10 years. The Strategic Plan 2.0 Continuation (2025-2040) aims to enhance our national impact by 2040, with a long-term goal of doubling extramural funding.
To achieve this, we will fulfill our commitments to the Centers of Excellence in: Cancer, Gastrointestinal Health, Cardiovascular Care, Orthopedics & Sports Medicine, Neurosciences, Transplantation, and Infectious Disease.
Why?
- Constant economic and geopolitical uncertainties and competition for workforce and funding is important.
- Physical proximity of research to clinical care is the accelerant to allow clinical faculty to remain actively involved in research while driving the clinical mission.
- National dominance in clinical quality and safety.
- Treasure trove of clinical data.
- Home of some of the fastest and most advanced research platforms in the world.
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01
Transforming Patient Care Now
Digital Health
Health care generates about 30% of the world’s data volume with 97% currently not being used. The utilization of technology in contemporary health care, particularly in the development of digital tools and solutions, is fraught with formidable challenges that can hinder seamless integration into clinical practice. These challenges underscore the urgent need for a paradigm shift that prioritizes medical expertise, collaboration and contextual comprehension.
The Digital Health Initiative is a transformative pioneering collaboration with Rice University to merge electrical and computational engineering with clinical practice to address real-world health care challenges using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). The goal is to analyze health care data to develop innovative software, devices, and methods to improve health care outcomes and drive economic growth. This approach separates data from the experts who understand medical terminology and clinical context, leading to issues with data interpretation, biases and errors.
The initiative's approach is distinguished by prioritizing expert-led innovation and collaboration. Successful implementation of this initiative could transform health care through improved access, better patient outcomes, enhanced efficiency and reduced costs. Specific impact goals include:
- Early Detection: AI algorithms for early detection of cancer and infections.
- Predictive Analytics: Real-time monitoring to predict and prevent heart failure and strokes.
- Personalized Medicine: Machine learning models to predict treatment responses based on genetic profiles.
- Operational Efficiency: AI to automate administrative tasks and optimize resource allocation.
- Public Health: AI to detect disease outbreaks and design vaccines faster.
- Telemedicine: AI-powered diagnostic consults to deliver high-quality care to remote areas.
- Patient Self-Management: AI-driven apps for personalized health advice and lifestyle recommendations.
Education and mentorship are foundational components of this approach. We aim to empower the next generation of health care leaders and researchers by including educational programs and mentoring students and postgraduate trainees. Early exposure to digital health science will equip them with the context and knowledge necessary to drive future advancements in health care.
Houston Methodist’s aspirations extend beyond scientific discovery to drive economic and societal impact. By promoting the commercialization of health care technologies, we aim to stimulate economic growth and enhance health care access globally. Our vision is rooted in developing scalable solutions that benefit diverse patient populations and health care systems worldwide.
By leveraging AI and digital tools, health care can become more proactive, personalized and efficient—ultimately leading to better patient outcomes and a more sustainable health care system.
Quality and Safety Innovation
In an industry accounting for more than 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product, health care providers see millions of patients seeking advice and treatment for ailments spanning from minor conditions to major life-threatening illnesses. Yet, even with the exhaustive training inherent in the profession, medical errors and lapses in quality do occur.
In response, hospital systems implement a range of processes to improve patient safety across quality protocols. As a result, performance improvement for staff often resembles a “homegrown,” reactive approach rather than application of best practices gleaned from clinical research. An absence of comprehensive, industry-leading investigation into improving quality and safety in practice hinders adapting a standard quality improvement program across the board and worldwide.
This initiative will be an innovator in setting new standards for patient-centered, cost-effective care based on rigorous Quality and Patient Safety Research. The vision is to become a globally recognized leader in quality, patient safety, performance excellence and innovation.
Houston Methodist leads the U.S. in safety ratings, with a Leapfrog Safety Grade of “A” and preventable adverse event rates well below 1%. This rate will continue to be driven to zero with rigorous research, evidence-based protocols and professional certification in quality and safety best practices. To drive innovation and continuous improvements, this initiative will:
- leverage the expertise of Houston Methodist, which leads the nation in the Vizient Quality and Accountability Survey and is ranked in the top 1% of hospitals in the country for overall clinical excellence, quality and safety, to create best practices.
- recruit quality, health care delivery, process-engineering and implementation scientists to perform clinical trials to pressure test these best practices to create consistent, evidence-based safety and quality protocols that can be published, replicated and adopted around the world.
- disseminate rigorously tested evidence-based protocols through Houston Methodist’s Quality and Patient Safety Academy that will teach the standardization of practice, adoption of evidence-based methods, performance excellence and change management.
Safe high-quality patient care relies on established procedures followed consistently. By establishing and sharing research-based quality measures, this initiative can help prevent the adverse events experienced by 1.2 million Americans each year and reinforce Houston Methodist’s reputation as an authority in excellence in clinical care, and our good standing with regulatory bodies, accreditation and the public.
Our Approach is to exceed the national challenge to eliminate preventable harm, reduce cost, maximize care quality through rigorous analysis and research.
Root Cause Analysis
Optimized Clinical Protocol
Rigorously Test Protocol
Publish Best Practices
National Certification Programs
Root Cause Analysis
Optimized Clinical Protocol
Rigorously Test Protocol
Publish Best Practices
National Certification Programs
Implementation Science
Clinical innovations can impact the quality, safety and efficiency of health care when it is successfully scaled and implemented in health care delivery systems and require hospital and clinic operators in the design and piloting of the innovation.
Today’s industry creates these solutions with limited input from the individuals who are responsible for implementing them in health care delivery systems to ensure they are operationally efficient and financially sustainable. Health care systems also adopt new innovations in a variety of ways, often not centralized or without the support of operations and administration, which creates often failure rather than success.
With a well-established reputation for excellence in the adoption of clinical innovation, Houston Methodist is continually building upon its culture of innovation. This phase of the Strategic Plan, Implementation Science, broadens our impact as the national authority for clinical innovation, implementation science and connected care. Not only will this accelerate the implementation of new technologies, but it will also ensure they are easy to adopt and use by patients and health care systems, maintain the continuity of care, and make care faster, more efficient and cost-effective.
The Houston Methodist Center for Innovation has carved out a leadership role in adoption and implementation of leading-edge health care technology by successfully creating an efficient bridge between inventions from large and small companies and implementing them into our system. Our model for innovation is based on the agile software development method that favors a fast, iterative approach to piloting and scaling.
This initiative allows Houston Methodist to conduct scientific studies that ground the learnings from the Center for Innovation in science that is generalized to other health care systems. In doing so, we elevate our success to the next level by adding data-driven implementation science that takes our learnings and teach other health care delivery systems how to scale and implement cost efficient innovations in their own environments to bring higher quality and safer care to patients.
This program will synergize with the Digital Health Initiative, conducting proof of concept, clinical adoption and implementation research for new products that are created. It will also train the next generation of caregivers in implementation science through Connected Care Fellowships for residents and medical students. Connected care is integrating patient care with different forms of technology, enabling better patient monitoring, communication between providers, patients and their families and coordination between providers.
This program will inform product conception, upstream product development and downstream piloting of new innovations with scientific rigor that will be generalizable to other health care systems. In this way, we will:
- speed up development of practical, high-need health care delivery innovation.
- accelerate the implementation of digital health innovations.
- reduce costs and increase efficiency of health care delivery.
- increase quality and safety of health care.
02
Transforming Patient Care Tomorrow
Healthspan Research
Health care systems traditionally focus on diagnosing and treating people with symptomatic illnesses. To move medicine upstream and keep patients in a state of wellness that prevents disease, it is essential to understand the underlying physiological factors that control health maintenance and define the tactics we can prescribe to maintain health on an individual basis.
For the past 10 years, our focus has shifted from researching how to increase “lifespan” to a better understanding of “Healthspan,” which emphasizes time lived in good health. The Healthspan field is still limited by complex issues including the lack of a standard measurement of “health” and the complexity of physiological, environmental and lifestyle factors that influence health and the presence of multifactorial diseases.
The Healthspan Research initiative expands the focus from “leading medicine” to “leading health” by leveraging original research and clinical care experience to help patients extend the time to remain healthy and free from serious diseases. This initiative will augment the skills of Houston Methodist in the “medicine of disease” by adding a new focus on the “medicine of health.” Many people who live healthy lives still develop serious diseases and some who do not engage in healthy behaviors live long, healthy lives. This raises questions about which recommendations to follow when seeking a long healthy life.
The key to getting more precise answers to these questions is to gain a better understanding of how the body maintains wellness. We can unlock these answers by extracting more information from our donated samples and combining them with a higher-level analysis of existing health data. With the right level of support, this data can be analyzed and explain why some people beat the odds of living longer healthier lives than others.
Houston Methodist is the academic medical center with the oldest patient population by age of admission in our country and it has one of the lowest mortality rates for patients older than 55 among U.S. hospitals. Along with our growing research and data infrastructure, we’re positioned to leverage research to maximize the health of older Houstonians and Americans.
If we are successful in advancing Healthspan science, we will shift the practice of medicine towards preventative care, reduce the incidence of age-related and chronic diseases, and restore disease-free, independent years to every life.
Better overall health will also benefit hospital inpatients. The comprehensive “health prescriptions” will address recovery and extend to overall wellness, resulting in shorter stays, fewer complications, quicker and fuller recovery, and a lower likelihood of readmission.
Gene Modulation
and Bioengineered Therapeutics
Existing therapies face limitations from high cost, low precision, and side effects often caused by unintended effects on the immune system. New techniques in gene editing, high-throughput protein engineering, RNA therapeutics, cell therapeutics, and nanotech have the potential to overcome these limitations, but few institutions have the necessary expertise, advanced facilities, and resources needed to design and produce these next generation therapeutics and vaccines.
This initiative will establish Houston Methodist as a premier destination for the rapid development of safe, immune-tuned therapeutics focusing on incurable diseases such as treatment-resistant cancers and genetic neurological disorders that are refractive to treatment, and on the rapid vaccine development for pandemic preparedness. Immune-tuning is a design imperative—balancing the destructive and protective capabilities of the immune system to create the safest and most effective therapies and vaccines.
Strategic investments in several bioengineering areas that will position us to lead in this field (biofoundry for high-throughput protein engineering, RNA therapeutics, cell therapeutics and nanotechnology). To complete our technology suite, we will add expertise in gene editing and immune-tuning and invest in additional key technologies to complete our bioengineering pipeline.
Our current differentiating bioengineering expertise include:
- A biofoundry that uses AI and machine-learning for the fastest design and selection of therapeutic leads.
- An RNA Therapeutics program that is a nationally renowned leader in RNA therapy development and production.
- The Ann Kimball and John W. Johnson Center for Cellular Therapeutics that provides in-house FDA-approved cell therapeutics production.
- The Nanomedicine program which enhances the stability, targeted delivery and bioavailability of Houston Methodist therapies.
- Cancer: Personalized TNBC vaccines developed using bioengineering platforms could lead to FDA-approved treatments.
- Infectious Diseases: CEPI grant-funded project to create a library of starter vaccines for emergent viruses, aiming to develop vaccines within 100 days.
- Neurological and Orthopedic Disorders: Developing treatments for orphan diseases such as Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease using gene editing and bioengineering technologies.
Robotics and Imaging
Home of the first coronary artery bypass graft and the first multi-organ transplant, the Bookout Center continues its legacy of success with the development of advanced robotic and imaging driven technologies and training medical providers for safe adoption with innovative simulation environments.
The vision of the Bookout Center robotics initiative is to create and advance efficient implementation of robotic and imaging technology-driven solutions to current and unmet clinical needs across a broad range of medical specialties. The goal is to create more precise, efficient and personalized surgical interventions.
Many hospitals lack access to integrated surgical training facilities, which are often isolated from hospital operations and research and development efforts, hindering collaborative teamwork and efficient resource sharing. This disconnect represents a missed opportunity for innovation. The MITIE surgical education and innovation unit offers integrated imaging equipment but lacks a cohesive research program to fully utilize its state-of-the-art capabilities for testing and industry collaboration.
Similar regional training centers across the nation, such as the Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation and the John Hopkins Minimally Invasive Surgical Training and Innovation Center, also operate independently from hospital and research environments. Globally, the Hamlyn Center at Imperial College London stands out for its progress towards integrating training with research, serving as a model for future robotic surgery innovation.
Houston Methodist has separate facilities and training areas for robotics, advanced imaging, digital surgery, and world-class surgical training facilities. Thanks to a generous gift from Ann and John F. Bookout III, the Bookout Center is integrating all of these on one floor of the Research Institute building and adding a makerspace and prototyping lab with an engineering research program. Our research team will go beyond robotic engineering to incorporate tools such as virtual and augmented reality, and artificial intelligence into our solutions.
The Center will continue to foster an environment of team-based learning for health professionals at all levels and specialties to hone their skills in simulated, highly realistic environments for the safe and efficient adoption of next-generation, emerging technologies.
Bookout Center’s three focus areas:
- Research: The Research Unit will conduct early-phase research of emerging technologies in the fields of robotics, imaging, and digital surgery. Areas of focus will include image-guided navigation, artificial intelligence, telepresence and remote communications, spatial computing, extended reality and sensory systems.
- Innovation Engineering (MIRIN): The Innovation Engineering Unit is the translational research and development arm that will apply the knowledge created in the research program to real-world problems.
- Surgical Training (MITIE): The Surgical Training Unit is a 29,000 square-foot specialized Center designed to educate medical professionals in a realistic and controlled environment.
