There’s no question Hopkins Children’s new Director of Emergency Medicine M. Douglas Baker, M.D., is setting his sights on building a premier emergency medicine service for the new Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center scheduled to open in early 2012. That means recruiting new staff and developing national leaders in pediatric emergency medicine. But in his dual role as Vice President for Community Outreach, there’s another high-priority goal in his vision – strengthening relationships with referring physicians. 

“We’re able to practice a much better brand of medicine when we have that strong link between the community pediatricians and the university faculty,” says Baker. “But that requires real-time communication between hospital staff and primary-care physicians, especially when the child is a patient in the ED or the medical center at large.” 

Baker should know – he brings a solid track record in connecting community and hospital physicians at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he served as director of medical services and interim chief of pediatric emergency medicine, and at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital, where he was chief of pediatric emergency services. Baker’s work at Yale with faculty and a tightly knit community of several hundred pediatricians, he notes, was successful through improving day-to-day communication but also setting realistic goals. 

“If the communication between house staff and community pediatricians didn’t happen, faculty felt it was their misstep, but there was also a reciprocal expectation that the primary-care physician would be available to discuss clinical issues and responsible for the follow up,” Baker says. “Real-time discussions between the attending physician in the hospital and the child’s primary-care physician in the community facilitated a higher quality of care for our patients.” 

Baker, whose claim to fame as a clinical investigator is his groundbreaking research on the management of fever in infants, says he enjoys mentoring staff and helping them develop their own research projects. The joy of being an administrator, he says, is in creating and building programs. His arrival at Hopkins Children’s, he adds, brings him full circle as he was recruited out of fellowship training at Boston Children’s in 1984 to become the first pediatric emergency medicine physician at Hopkins and one of the first such specialists in the country. 

“I started building that service at Hopkins Children’s back then and have now returned to help complete the job,” Baker says. “Having the new children’s hospital open in a year and a half is certainly icing on the cake.”