Johns Hopkins University has just announced its 35 Discovery Award winners for 2023. The Hopkins Business of Health Initiative (HBHI) is excited to announce that two of these projects will be awarded additional seed grant funding by HBHI.

HBHI was founded in 2020 to catalyze new cross-school collaborations between the business school and health schools to address critical national health system challenges. “The prestigious Discovery Awards Program, like HBHI, seeks to spark new interactions among investigators across the university,” said Dan Polsky, Director of HBHI. “We were honored to form a partnership with this program to enhance opportunities for the strongest proposals on the business of health.”

Hospitals should be able to equitably provide care, particularly for patients with disabilities. Bonnielin Swenor, School of Nursing, Disability Health Research Center, and Theodore (Jack) Iwashyna, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Knowledge to Action and the Business of Health cluster; School of Medicine, Pulmonary; and Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy & Management, are working collaboratively to build evidence-based tools that make it easy for hospitals to achieve better and more equitable outcomes through the implementation of Universal Design. 

Rising drug prices continue to wreak havoc on family budgets. Solutions to bring down rising healthcare spending include finding ways to unlock the market for biosimilars, in ways that a robust market for generic drugs reduced spending on small molecule drugs. This cross-disciplinary team—Manuel Hermosilla, Carey Business School; Kelly Anderson, Affiliate Scholar, HBHI and the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences; and Joseph Levy, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy & Management—will seek a solution through an understanding of the commercial frictions arising in the negotiations between drug manufacturers and hospitals

Congratulation to these two outstanding teams of HBHI Core Faculty who have come together across the schools of the university to tackle vexing healthcare challenges. We expect these awards will facilitate important discoveries and impact on health care policy and practice.