Music and medicine are two passions that Kevin Johnson, pictured in front of his new digs at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, can pursue in Nashville.(Photo by Dana Johnson/Vanderbiilt)

Tuning up in Nashville Kevin Johnson ’83, M.D., takes on Music City By Sherri Kimmel

He had a satisfying dual career at one of the world’s major research hospitals, in his hometown no less. But late last summer Kevin Johnson ’83, pediatrician/computer scientist, bid “Bawlmer” goodbye and succumbed to the song of the South. At Vanderbilt University Medical Center he hopes to take both his research career and his avocation—music—to new levels.
Associated with his medical-school alma mater, Johns Hopkins University (JHU), for most of the last 20 years, the busy associate professor of pediatrics and biomedical informatics decided to “seek a career move that fostered all aspects of my life. I wanted to improve my work environment and my career potential, but I also wanted to get more immersed in music, have some time to play tennis, and enjoy weekends with my wife and daughter.”

It’s no accident that Music City USA would be his destination, for while settling into his new role as associate professor and vice chairman of Vanderbilt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and associate professor of pediatrics, he’s also trying to line up gigs as a background vocalist. (He had to give up his baritone slot in the Baltimore Choral Arts Society when he moved.)
Vanderbilt, one of 17 medical facilities listed in the U.S. News & World Report 2002 Honor Role for Best Hospitals, also offered the right career balance. Johnson is not only second in charge of a department of 23 M.D.- or Ph.D.-holding faculty, but he does research in medical informatics—using information, technology and communication to improve health and health-care processes—and “twice a year, for a three-week period, I get to take off my research hat and don a stethoscope and pretend to be a pediatrician full time.” A new children’s hospital and “role models for me in the clinical setting and in research” sweetened the deal.

That making music also was a factor in his move South comes as no surprise to his former Dickinson professors. Johnson’s musical prowess prompted this recent superlative from his former choir director, Truman Bullard, professor emeritus of music: “He was one of my top five or six singers in my 35 years here.” While hearing the comment repeated elicits a hoot of disbelief from Johnson, others are not so skeptical.

Professor of Biology Tom Brennan, who was Johnson’s adviser, notes, “With his academic gifts and his skills in music, he was Dickinson’s version of Paul Robeson.” Brennan was referring to the African-American singer who was an academic star at Rutgers University, Brennan’s alma mater.

While Johnson’s superior musical ability was a rarity, so was his interest in computers. “In a sense he may have been ahead of his time,” contends Brennan. “Maybe he saw the future of computers before we did, and he saw the potential for their use in medicine.”

To Johnson, Brennan’s support of his penchant for computer science was key to his future. “What Tom did, in a fairly quiet way, was to foster what I wanted to do. He appreciated that I was trying to hybridize biology and computer-science knowledge as a career goal. That’s what the liberal arts is supposed to do. He said, ‘You’re doing fine. Enjoy yourself. Have fun.’ ”
Fun was precisely the point of Johnson’s initial interest in computers. After seeing a fellow student create a computer game Johnson decided he wanted to make one of his own.

Johnson, shown here with a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital, always has enjoyed working in the clinical setting.

“I thought this was a neat way to express your creativity. I learned to program as a way of escaping between other things on campus. Then I began to wonder if there was a call for it in medicine.” He found out when he took an independent-study course on the use of computers in medicine with the late Prof. Robert Paul. He found further mentoring for his computer interests in medical school and, after his residency in pediatrics at JHU, earned an M.S. in medical informatics at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Nowadays Dickinson has a concentration in bioinformatics, which Brennan explains as “how genetic information is analyzed and looks at data from the human genome system.” Johnson’s field has a different emphasis: the study of information management in medicine. “Medical informatics starts at the level of the person and moves out to society,” says Johnson. “Bioinformatics starts at the level of the person and moves inward, dealing more with genes, cells and molecules.

“A lot of what medical-informatics people do is to try to understand what the current problems are in decision making,” he adds. “We think about the fact that there may be patient data or knowledge that is not being used appropriately. We look at the risks that people face when they become patients in a hospital. Thirty percent of the time records can get messed up, with pages missing or being misfiled. Physicians and the system are not infrequently guilty of errors of omission or commission. Informatics is one of the ways we can deal with both types of errors.”

Miscommunication between a doctor, hospital or pharmacy about a patient’s prescription can be a safety hazard. “A patient may not be given the medicine she needs because her health-care providers don’t have all of the information.”

While teaching medical students, helping to run a department, doing research, seeing patients and trying to ignite a low-key singing career may seem improbable to most people, those who knew him at Dickinson see it as vintage Johnson. After all, he sang in three choirs, played string bass in the orchestra, hosted a two-hour radio show on WDCV, played tennis and belonged to Beta Theta Pi fraternity while here. How did he manage it all?

“There are really not that many classes in college,” he explains. “I never felt like I was as busy as I could have been. A lot of the time I was doing musical things.”

According to Bullard, who had many science majors in his choirs, it was not unusual for students to have a crossover in abilities. Johnson concurs. “There is a certain amount of delayed gratification, a certain amount of diligence in both. The trick to music is having the big and the small picture all of the time—knowing the notes, but understanding the composer and the genre. Likewise, in medicine, you have to be attentive to very fine details but also to a family at exactly the same time. You also use memorization in both.”

To Bullard, efficiency is a key trait of the premed major who wants to do serious music. “Kevin got 60 minutes out of every hour. With a student like Kevin I realized that he only had so much time for me, because he was going on to something important.”

That Johnson would move on to something as important as the Vanderbilt job was expected. “It was just a question of time before he became a national figure in medicine,” says Bullard, who knew 20 years ago that Johnson would go far. “His versatility made him the ideal liberal-arts student. The fact that he was so good at so many things made him the ideal student for Dickinson.”

Besides working on a book that Johnson dubs “my equivalent of Mr. Holland’s Opus,” he’s polishing three songs (he wrote the lyrics for two of them) for a demo CD to shop around to studios. “I’ll tell [producers] I don’t want to be the next Garth Brooks. I just want to do background vocals, and you don’t even have to pay me.”

While he’s learning to appreciate all music now that he lives in the Country Music Capital of the World, there are some tunes he will not warble. “If it’s twangy and involves a banjo, I’m probably not into it. If there’s yodeling involved I’m not part of it.” •