Cynda Hylton Rushton Named to Board of Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics, Nursing & Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, is one of four new members appointed to the Board of Directors of The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) on May 5, 2026.
“Serving on the IHI Board at this pivotal moment offers a unique opportunity to collaborate and innovate nationally and globally to rehumanize health care through deliberate, trustworthy collective action,” said Rushton. “It advances the design of systems that uphold the dignity and integrity of all amid the complex challenges facing health care today.”
Rushton is an internationally recognized nursing leader in bioethics, system transformation, and clinician well-being. She has led state and national initiatives to advance ethical practice, moral resilience, and compassionate care across health care settings. She is a professor of clinical ethics, nursing, and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University and has co-led landmark efforts to address clinician burnout and ethical challenges in care delivery. Her work centers on supporting clinicians and health systems in delivering care rooted in integrity, compassion, and trust.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is a leading, globally recognized not-for-profit health care improvement organization that has been applying evidence-based quality improvement methods to meet current and future health care challenges for more than 30 years. IHI provides millions of people in health care with methods, tools, and resources to make care better, safer, and more equitable; convenes experts to enable knowledge sharing and peer-learning; and advises health systems and hospitals of all sizes in improving their systems and outcomes at scale.
“At a time when health systems worldwide are facing unprecedented complexity, IHI must draw on the very best thinking across disciplines,” said Sylvia Trent‑Adams, PhD, RN, President and CEO of IHI. “Our new Board members bring deep expertise in global health, governance, technology, and clinical leadership — perspectives that will sharpen our ability to advance quality, safety, equity, and system transformation at scale. I am delighted to welcome them as partners in IHI’s mission to improve health and health care for all.”
Thomas H. Gallagher, MD
Janie Abernethy, MD, MBE
Henry Brems, MD, MBE, MHS
What to Expect
Harnessing the Promise of Nursing
Feels Like Home
Faculty Receive Discovery Award for Project Highlighting Children with Medical Complexity
“‘Feels Like Home’: Lived Experiences of Children with Medical Complexity and Their Families,” an interactive audiovisual experience that will bring multiple audiences into the homes of children with medical complexity (CMC) and their families, has been named the recipient of a 2024 Discovery Award given to interdisciplinary faculty teams across Johns Hopkins University.
Led by Rebecca Seltzer, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine, and Lauren Arora Hutchinson, Director of the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, the project will result in three distinct outputs:
- An audio documentary intended for broad public audiences that explores how families with CMC experience their home environment, a unique blend of hospital and traditional home;
- A short film to immerse the viewers in how families with CMC adapt/build their home environment to meet their child and family’s needs, capturing both challenges and ingenuity;
- An interactive website to house the multimedia created and collected through this project.
“We envision the audio documentary and short film to be used on broader scales as teaching and advocacy tools. This could include incorporating them in medical provider training programs; using them as central discussion elements at conferences, panels, and live events; sharing short snippets in policy-making spaces,” said Dr. Seltzer.
The interactive website created during the initial phase will begin as a dynamic hosting platform for the audio and video deliverables and grow over time into a hub where audiences come to get resources and share their own stories.
The Discovery Awards encourage faculty from various disciplines to collaborate in addressing multifaceted challenges and pushing the boundaries of understanding. Altogether, the winning project teams—chosen from 286 proposals—include 148 individuals representing 11 Johns Hopkins entities.
“This project is an example of how the iDeas Lab can work with faculty from the outset of a project to envision and create outputs that will reach and immerse audiences beyond academia, getting them to think deeply and differently about topics,” said Arora Hutchinson. “The Lab has a team of creative producers – specialists in audio, video, and digital media who produce podcasts, videos, screenplays, films, and interactive projects – who look forward to creatively engaging with families with lived experiences on this important matter and making sure their unique perspectives are heard and shared.”
In addition, Abigail Brickler, a production assistant at the iDeas Lab, has experience as the caregiver of a parent with medical complexity and brings that important perspective to this project. Other key partners on the project include parent caregivers of children with medical complexity and the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center.
“This project’s deliverables are both public-facing and family-centered, which we hope will foster feelings of community amongst similarly-situated families and promote a shared sense of humanity amongst audiences who perhaps were previously unaware,” said Seltzer.
Overcoming Barriers of Language and Literacy in Neonatal Intensive Care
As physicians in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), Renee Boss and Sara Munoz-Blanco know their patients’ outcomes following discharge are often directly linked to effective communication with parents. Making the transition from hospital to home can be overwhelming and frightening for any parent, and even more so when the parents can’t effectively ask questions or receive information because of a language barrier.
To help address this problem among Latinos, the fastest-growing ethnic group in both Maryland and the United States, Boss and Munoz-Blanco collaborated with the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics to develop “Nos Vamos a Casa©,” (which translates as “We Are Going Home”) a novel web-based interface that enables patient families and their doctors to overcome barriers of language and literacy to exchange vital information.
“We care for a substantial number of Latino Spanish-speaking children and their families across our healthcare system who often have medical complexity and ongoing healthcare needs after NICU discharge,” said Boss, the Rembrandt Foundation Professor of Pediatric Palliative Care at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a Berman Institute faculty member.
“Our tool will increase a family’s knowledge about their child’s medical big picture, being a NICU parent, and preparedness of anticipated challenges after NICU discharge. We believe it will help improve communication between families and medical teams during their admission, promote family-centered care, as well as better prepare families for life at home.”
Available at the patient’s bedside, “Nos Vamos a Casa” contains a question prompt list (QPL) that Boss and Munoz-Blanco developed in a pilot study by conducting focus groups with NICU and primary care providers, as well as Spanish-speaking parents of NICU patients. As parents review the QPL, accessible in Spanish in both print and audio, they can flag the questions they need to have addressed. Members of their care team, including doctors, nurses, case managers and social workers, then access that list of highlighted questions electronically, in either English and Spanish, and use it as a guide for discussion with parents.
“During our pilot study, providers found the QPL helpful. Families reported they would use our tool and would recommend it to other Latino families in the NICU. In addition, they reported the tool would help them to prepare for life at home, make it easier to ask questions, to think about questions, and even put their concerns into words,” said Munoz-Blanco, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and the project’s principal investigator. “But there were still literacy barriers and we wanted to have an interactive, user-friendly web-based audio interface that would make both families and physicians more likely to use the QPL.”
Supported by a JHU Innovation Grant and grant from the Thomas Wilson Sanitarium for the Children of Baltimore City, Boss and Munoz-Blanco worked with the Berman Institute’s Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab to create the solution they envisioned. Launched in 2022, the iDeas Lab is a creative studio utilizing new technologies and storytelling techniques to help bioethicists at Johns Hopkins share their work with the general public in more effective and engaging ways. “Nos Vamos a Casa” is the first QPL ever to be designed in audio format, and its user-friendliness was intentional and essential to overcome potential literacy barriers.
“This has been a very rewarding project for the iDeas Lab. We collaborated with the researchers from the outset, helping them identify the right communications vehicle then working with them throughout the development process to get the best possible result for families as well as their doctors and other care providers,” said Lauren Arora Hutchinson, Director of the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab.
“While we are really proud of other public-facing projects we have done, such as podcasts with hundreds of thousands of listens, we found it inspiring to work on this tool which had such a specific audience. Renee and Sara’s earlier research had demonstrated the need to create a tool for supporting parents at such a crucial period of their life, so using technology and storytelling to find a solution to this communication issue was important to our values as a creative lab.”
To provide the Spanish-language audio narration, the team turned to a Spanish-speaking parent. As the tools were being developed, a consultation session was held with members of Baltimore’s Latino community through Centro SOL (Salud y Oportunidades for Latinxs) to ensure they were not only useful but also culturally appropriate.
Earlier this year, families and medical teams at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center began using “Nos Vamos a Casa.” Preliminary data is very promising. For example, almost 60% of families reported discussing website questions with their baby’s medical team and reported initiating those conversations. All families reported the website content helped them cope with being a NICU parent, thinking of and asking questions to the medical team, and preparing for life at home.
Research is ongoing. Boss and Munoz-Blanco hope to share it with families and NICUs across the country, at first in Spanish and then in other languages as well.
“We’re doing implementation science,” said Boss. “It’s not just studying patients and families, it’s doing medical research that will benefit those patients and families and then making sure it’s available to them.”
© 2023 The Johns Hopkins University. All rights reserved.
Berman Institute of Bioethics Launches New Podcast “playing god?” with Pushkin Industries
In recent years, we have collectively witnessed a rapid development of medical breakthroughs with the potential to transform and save lives. With such powerful advancements, though, often come thorny questions. The Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University and Pushkin Industries have teamed up to create playing god?, a new podcast that shares the deeply personal — and incredibly moving — stories of people caught at the life-and-death crossroads of medical innovations and ethical dilemmas.
Launching October 10, 2023, this ten-episode series is hosted by award-winning audio storyteller and BBC alumna Lauren Arora Hutchinson, Director of the Berman Institute’s Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas lab. Arora-Hutchinson introduces listeners to real people faced with dire circumstances: a burn victim kept alive by a ventilator while family and friends fought over whether to allow her to die; a bar manager in immediate need of a liver transplant who faced a long-accepted and previously unquestioned practice of a six-month waiting period for liver failure due to excessive alcohol use; a mother hoping against hope that a new combination of reproductive technologies might bring her a healthy child who was also a genetic match for her child suffering from a fatal genetic disease. Decisions that may seem objectively clear-cut take new shape as listeners come to know these people as individuals with compelling and relatable motivations and wishes.
Through these highly personal stories, Arora-Hutchinson weaves interviews with experts and family members. While bringing to light the decisions faced by doctors, patients and families alike, she examines how technological innovations can help bring lifesaving–and life-creating–medical advances but raise a host of ethical issues in the process. Arora-Hutchinson is joined by internationally renowned bioethics experts including Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Berman Institute, who provides clear-eyed perspective on the bioethics behind these cases.
“Pushkin Industries is thrilled to be partnering with The Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University for this powerful exploration of the difficult questions that lie at the heart of bioethics,” said Gretta Cohn, Pushkin’s SVP of Content. ”Hearing from the world’s preeminent experts alongside the compelling personal accounts offers listeners a fascinating exploration of critically important issues.”
Episode 1: I Would’ve Let You Die, Too
Episode 2: The Girl Who Died Twice
Episode 3: Need a new Liver? Drinkers to the back of the Line.
Episode 4: Why Can’t I Buy a Kidney?
Episode 5: A Womb of One’s Own?
Episode 6: Creating One Life to Save Another
Episode 7: An Off-Switch for Depression?
Episode 8: Miracle Drugs, Million Dollar Price Tags
Episode 9: The Future of Baby-Making
Episode 10: Prequel: The God Squad
“Bioethics is the ultimate form of storytelling; there is always a conflict and a life at stake,” said Arora-Hutchinson. “Listening to these experiences in audio has literally changed the way I think about life and death. It brings home the importance of us all understanding how these medical decisions are made every day.”
playing god? is available October 10, 2023, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen to the trailer here and download the cover art here.
ABOUT THE HOST
Lauren Arora Hutchinson joined the Berman Institute in June 2022 as the inaugural director of the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab. She was previously a BBC journalist, award-winning audio storyteller, and academic who served as part of the core organizing team for the Berman Institute’s 2020 Levi Symposium, “The Ethics of Virtual Humans.” Arora-Hutchinson holds a PhD in the History of Science with a focus on Oral History from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she taught in the Masters for Global Public Health program for six years, and completed a Wellcome Trust Imperial Media Fellowship to develop skills in science communication.
Arora-Hutchinson founded the immersive audio studio Sunday Blue to further explore the intersection between sound, story and interactivity and look at how intimate experiences can be shared. She has produced more than 20 independent features for the BBC, including talking to holocaust survivor Eva Schloss about becoming a hologram, speaking to Manfred Mohr about being one of the first people to use a computer to make art, and looking at how virtual reality has been used to explore grief.
ABOUT THE EXPERTS
Jeffrey Kahn, PhD, MPH, is the Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy, as well as Professor in the Dept. of Health Policy and Management in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an international leader in bioethics whose areas of work include exploring the intersection of ethics and health and science policy, human and animal research ethics, ethics and public health, and ethical issues in emerging biomedical and life sciences technologies.
Anna Mastroianni, JD, MPH, is Research Professor in Bioethics and Law at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, and previously Charles I. Stone Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law. A former practicing attorney, she is known for her work examining complex issues at the intersection of law, bioethics, public health, and health policy, including legal and ethical challenges arising in research in pregnancy, the use of genetic technologies in public health, and family building through assisted reproductive technologies.
Including their roles as co-Executive Producers on playing god?, Kahn and Mastroianni have partnered on many projects and are the editors and authors of the books Contemporary Issues in Bioethics; Beyond Consent: Seeking Justice in Research; and The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics, and many articles based on their research. They share a commitment to the public communication of bioethics issues, and speak widely across the U.S. and around the world on a range of bioethics topics, in addition to frequently appearing in the media to explain bioethics issues.
ABOUT BERMAN INSTITUTE OF BIOETHICS AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY / THE iDEAS LAB
A global leader in its field, the Berman Institute of Bioethics is an interdisciplinary university-wide institute that draws expertise from across the breadth of Johns Hopkins University to study and address complex moral and policy issues in biomedical science, health care, and public health. Since its establishment in 1995, the Institute has been a leader in bioethics research, and in engagement among a broad range of scholars, health professionals, policymakers, students, and citizens.The Berman Institute established the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab in 2021 to better inform the public, health care professionals, governments, and the private sector about critically important issues in bioethics and ethics in science more generally. As a creative incubator, the Lab is pioneering new approaches for creating bioethics content and storytelling, taking advantage of new media strategies and the latest media technologies to provide engaging, accurate and compelling content about the ethical issues surrounding decision-making in science, medicine and public health.