News Release

BIDMC gerontologist Sharon K. Inouye, M.D., M.P.H., elected to Institute of Medicine

Grant and Award Announcement

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

BOSTON – Sharon K. Inouye, MD, MPH, a faculty member in the Division of Gerontology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Director of the Aging Brain Center in the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has been elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

Election to the IOM is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service. Unique in its structure as both an honorific membership organization and an advisory organization, the IOM was established in 1970 and is one of four distinguished organizations that make up the National Academies, which provide scientific and technological advice to the nation.

BIDMC faculty members Jeffrey S. Flier, MD; Jerome E. Groopman, MD; Barbara B. Kahn, MD; and Clifford B. Saper, MD, PhD, are also members of the IOM. BIDMC faculty members Lewis C. Cantley, PhD, and Richard Sidman, MD, are elected members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Inouye is an internationally recognized expert in aging and geriatric medicine, clinical research methods and research training, whose investigations into the recognition of and risk factors for the onset of delirium in elderly patients have influenced hospital care around the world. The founder of a cost-effective hospital model to help healthcare providers prevent delirium, she currently serves as Director of the Successful Aging after Elective Surgery (SAGES) study, an $11 million Program Project on Delirium funded by the National Institute on Aging.

"Dr. Inouye's insights and commitment to better understanding delirium has pioneered a field, which holds profound implications for patients and their families, as well as for the field of health care more generally," notes Mark Zeidel, MD, Chair of the Department of Medicine at BIDMC.

Adds Lewis Lipsitz, MD, Chief of the Division of Gerontology, which includes faculty at BIDMC and Hebrew SeniorLife, "Dr. Inouye is addressing one of the most critically important medical issues in our growing elderly population. Delirium develops in over 3 million older persons in the U.S. each year, accounting for more than $100 billion of annual healthcare expenditures and may be an important, reversible precipitant of dementia. By focusing on ways to recognize and prevent delirium, we can improve the overall quality of hospital care, prevent hospital-related complications, and enable our older patients to return home independently."

Inouye received her medical degree from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and received a Master's in Public Health degree from Yale University. After completing her internship at UCSF, she completed residencies at the former Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and at UCSF Primary Care, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in General Internal Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Postdoctoral Fellow (Geriatrics/Clinical Epidemiology) in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University School of Medicine.

Prior to joining the faculty of BIDMC, Hebrew SeniorLife and Harvard Medical School in 2005, Inouye spent 20 years as a faculty member at Yale, most recently as a tenured Professor of Medicine, Director of the Yale Mentored Clinical Research Scholar Program and Co-director of the Yale Program on Aging and the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center.

Inouye developed and validated a new instrument for the identification of delirium called the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM), which is now translated into more than 20 languages and is the most widely used in the field. She also developed the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP) to prevent delirium in hospitalized patients. Published in a landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the strategy has been successful in reducing delirium in hospitalized patients by 40 percent and has been disseminated to over 200 hospitals worldwide.

Inouye has been awarded many of the highest accolades in her field, including the 2010 Edward Henderson Award from the American Geriatrics Society, National Research Award from the Alzheimer's Association, the UCLA David H. Solomon Award, the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award (Arnold P. Gold Foundation), the Society of Distinguished Teachers of Yale University, the Ewald W. Busse Research Award in Biomedical Sciences from the Gerontological Society of America, Midcareer Award from the National Institute on Aging, the Donaghue Investigator Award and the American Geriatrics Society's Outstanding Scientific Achievement for Clinical Investigation Award.

An elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, Inouye serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and on the editorial boards of the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American Journal of Medicine.

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Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School and currently ranks in the top three in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is a clinical partner of the Joslin Diabetes Center and a research partner of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit www.bidmc.org.


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