 Now, joining us to talk about your health is Dr. Bert O'Malley, the president and chief executive officer of the University of Maryland Medical Center. Dr., thank you so much for joining us. You're celebrating a bicentennial there. Tell us a little bit about the history of your institution. Well, thanks, Jeff. It's great to be here. So, we are 200 years. Happy birthday to us. And I think the significance one is the uniqueness of Maryland, the medical center, and what its mission is and that it's been doing it for so long. So, I'll kind of summarize on that. The University of Maryland Medical Center is an academic medical center. And what does that mean? In medicine, the academic medical centers are those that provide excellent and highly complex care. They're referral centers for other hospitals around the state or region. They provide training for residents and medical students, really training the future of medicine across an entire state or many students, they go across a nation. And they have a researcher discovery mission. So, they're doing science and experiments to try to build and develop and discover the cures of the future, new treatments, new drugs, new surgical procedures and therapies. And that is academic medicine. Now, Maryland, University of Maryland Medical Center is unique among academic medical centers, in my opinion, because of that, what we call a tripartate mission, the University of Maryland Medical Center has a quadrupartate mission. It was established 200 years ago by faculty physicians of the School of Medicine for training and education. It was the first, so the reports say the first teaching hospital in the United States of America. And it was built in the community to the city and in the West Baltimore community. And in that teaching, a part of it was providing access to an underserved community and reaching out and connecting with the community. So, the medical center's community mission is incredibly strong. It has grown over 200 years for this quadrupartate mission. So, that's what we're celebrating, our uniqueness and what we do. What are some of the milestones or accomplishments over the centuries that stand out for you? So, there are quite a few, but I'll name a couple that we feel are very significant. One, in 1968, we established the first trauma hospital and trauma program in the United States of America, shock trauma. And shock trauma remains a unique trauma center, not only in the state, in the nation, if not unique in the world, that it's fully dedicated. Emergency rooms and receiving units, operating rooms, recovery rooms, ICUs and floors, and all the wraparound services needed to care for patients of trauma, all within and dedicated to trauma. There's nothing like that. That was 68, 77. The medical center opened the first neonatal intensive care unit called the NICU. And those are for premature babies. Years ago, even just a decade ago, the babies that are being born today did not survive. We were able to keep these 19, 20, 21-week plus babies alive in a very intense care called the neonatal intensive care unit. It was the first and it remains the largest NICU in the state of Maryland. We developed new treatments for breast cancer, Dr. Angela Brody. They were called aromatase inhibitors. And they helped prevent recurrence of breast cancer. That was in the early 2000s. Performed the first combined heart liver transplant in the state in 2007. And maybe a few years later, around 2012, the first comprehensive broad face transplant in the world. And then something that's hit the news recently, last year in 2022. And then recently, as of five weeks ago, the first animal, a pig heart transplant into a live human. So, we're steep in discovery and innovation. I only outlined a few. Over the couple hundred years, there have been a variety of public health emergencies. You would have been in business for the Spanish flu and the pandemic that we just had. When you think about your focus on community, those are really challenging times, but also an opportunity to make a huge difference in the community. So, COVID was craziness, right? And unprecedented. I wasn't around for the Spanish flu, but I read a lot about it and learned a lot more during COVID. But I was right in the midst of it at COVID as the CEO of the medical center. And it was really, really challenged. One thing we did demonstrate was our commitment to the community. And we set up testing centers, vaccination centers, including working with the system for the opening up an entire stadium. We had mobile vaccination trucks and buildings that we built so that we can provide the testing and vaccination for our community with a strong focus for the medical center on West Baltimore. In addition to running the medical center, you also find time to perform surgery. Tell us a little bit about your professional background and your specialty in head and neck surgery. Sure. So, officially, the residency is in Oto Rhino Laryngology head and neck surgery, others commonly known as ENT. Within that specialty is a further subspecialty of head neck and skull-based tumor surgery. And that is my subspecialty. I was also a scientist in the early days. I do less science now, given the CEO role, but I'm able to keep up my surgical focus on head and neck cancer, and in particular, robotic surgery. How much have the robots changed that specific type of operation? Well, robot surgeries, in many ways, and components is transforming healthcare on the surgical side across specialty. So I'm a little biased. I have to admit, because in 2004, myself and a colleague, Dr. Greg Weinstein, conceived, invented, and developed transor robotic surgery. So that then became FDA approved in 2009 with subsequent approvals for the use. So what that did for us, I'll say from my expertise in head and neck cancer, and I won't go into too much detail, but classically for tumors in the back of the throat, to get there, Jeff, for anybody surgically, you'd have to open up the face and jaw and do some very destructive things to the human body, requiring tubes in your neck to breathe and so forth, because to get to the tumor, you have to open up the body. So that was long operations, high complications, high risk, and all kinds of other things that go along with it. So the benefit of the robot using the instruments, it can climb into the mouth with tiny little hands, much smaller than our human hands, and do surgery from inside out. So you take a 10-hour surgery, and it becomes an hour and a half without those destructive side effects. So that really is, in my world, how it transformed surgical approaches to cancer. And when I talk about robotic surgery, it may sound like the robot's doing all the work. I mean, the surgeon's still doing the procedure, but with the miniaturization, the stabilization that the equipment offers. Tell us, where is that field heading? I read a fascinating thing recently about how the robots, with their high definition cameras, will ultimately be able to see things that you can't really, you could not see with your eyes. So be able to tell you if there's some stray surprise blood vessel right behind where you're about to go, that sort of thing. So a lot into that question here. So I will clarify, as at this present time, when we do robot surgery, you have a patient with the robot instrumentation in whatever part of the body we're operating on. For me, it would be through the mouth or back of the throat. So in an operating room, at the same time, the surgeon is sitting 10 feet away on a console, sitting on a console, looking through goggles on a machine in 3D, almost like a video game, moving controls that translate to moving the instruments on the robot. So the surgeons are doing the procedure. So a couple of things. What's into the future? Well, we'll start with what you mentioned, the visualization or optics. Think of a microscope, right? We can look at a slide or a little bit of tissue. A microscope can look at the cell level, something our eyes can't see. So the power of magnification and optics, telescopes looking into the universe, is what we could bring in. So yes, we could see blood vessels or nerves that are only a millimeter away that we want to spare and save. We might be able to see tumor cells that we can't see with our human eye to say, oh, we need to remove a little bit more to make sure we get that tumor out. So that benefit is we're just scratching the surface of what's possible. And then the second thing is, I don't know at one point, but the technology is working on it, can a surgeon, being there and governing it, outline a procedure, just like a machine puts together a car or like these 3D printers, can it actually do a component that's automated? And who knows where that's going to go? So when you think about entering your third century as an institution, I guess even the size you have and the history you have, do you have to focus on some key areas? We want to be the leaders, the innovators in these couple of fields. And what do you want that to be? What do you want the University of Maryland Medical Center to be known for across its third century? So that's a great point. I want to state for sure that we are in value all aspects of medicine. We provide comprehensive medicine at every level of education, clinical care, research. But in differentiating yourself, I'm trying to be the world leader. It's not possible to be a world leader in everything at the same time, although some of those come and go with our physicians making a discovery in some area. So when I explain the focus, it's not that we're de-emphasizing anything else, it's where we have current momentum in discovery or in presence and delivery of care across our state. So one is cardiovascular surgery. And we have a tremendous surgical team. We have a tremendous research team. And the porcine heart transplant first in the world is a classic example. We're world leaders in that. And there's a lot of science and immunology and laboratory work that needs to go on to continue to advance that. So that's a big focus of ours is cardiovascular. Neuroscience is another one, both neurosurgery and neurology. And we have programs such as high intensity focus ultrasound that are only a few places in the world that are doing this and across the nation, where we take radio waves and concentrate them into a tiny little point to try to hit a part of the brain that stops people from having tremors and motion disorders. It's transformative. So that is a strong effort. Given the fact that we mentioned the heart transplant, the first in the state combined heart and kidney transplant that I mentioned earlier, transplantation in general is a big focus of ours and emphasis as we move into the future. Doctor, you sound like a guy who can't wait to get back to work. So we really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about the history and the future of University of Maryland Medicine. Dr. Birdo Malley, thank you for your time. Thank you. Your health segments are a co-production of Maryland Public Television and the University of Maryland Medical System.