In the two years since he joined University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Daniel I. Simon, MD, has thoroughly revitalized the newly named Harrington-McLaughlin Heart & Vascular Institute. With the extraordinary $22.6 million gift from the Harrington- McLaughlin family, the Institute is now poised to become one of the premier cardiovascular centers in the U.S.

The families were inspired to give this tremendous gift by the pioneering calcium scoring and heart attack prevention programs of Carl E. Orringer, MD, Director of Preventive Cardiology at UH, and the impressive leadership of Dr. Simon, Director of the Harrington-McLaughlin Heart & Vascular Institute.

“The piece that really intrigued us is Dr. Simon’s entrepreneurial approach to building the Institute,” said Ronald G. Harrington, who along with his wife Nancy and their family run the Harrington-McLaughlin Family Foundation. “His goal of making this one of the top five centers in the country is a little bit edgy and we respect that.”

Ron is the quintessential entrepreneur. Within 10 years, he and Nancy built the floundering Edgepark Medical Supplies company into the leading mail-order provider of medical supplies in the U.S. Five years ago, they retired and turned over the reins to their son, Ron, Jr., CEO; son-in-law Steve McLaughlin, president; and their daughter, Jill McLaughlin.

The entire family believes strongly in giving back. Dr. Simon is grateful for their philanthropic spirit.
“The Harrington gift is obviously monumental and transformative,” said Dr. Simon. “Their gift has greatly strengthened our mission to position ourselves not only as a top-ranked national center of cardiovascular excellence from a clinical standpoint, but also to identify ourselves as a top-ranked international center of excellence.”

Since being appointed as Chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at University Hospitals, Dr. Simon has implemented a strategy similar to the one employed by general managers of major league baseball teams to build championship clubs: leverage the strengths of the existing players, draw on the talents in the farm system (in this case, fellowships), and recruit the top free agents for clinical and research positions.

“We had a very strong existing team whose ranks were depleted and needed a significant amount of supplementation when we got here,” Dr. Simon related.

“That’s been accomplished through recruitment of extraordinary physicians and scientists who came
for the amazing academic medicine opportunities.” Capitalizing on the great admiration and affection his colleagues have for him, Dr. Simon enlisted 15 physician scientists and their families to relocate from Boston, where he was formerly Associate Professor of Medicine and Associate Director of Interventional Cardiology at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. From the latter, he recruited James C. Fang, MD, Chief Medical Officer, to run Clinical Cardiology, and Mukesh K. Jain, MD, to serve as Chief Research Officer for the Heart & Vascular Institute. He also recruited six additional clinician-scientists from Harvard and two from the University of Pennsylvania – all highly accomplished individuals supported by the National Institutes of Health.

“The most important piece was recruiting and establishing the right leadership out of the gate,” Dr. Simon
said. “Dr. Jain, for example, has built a very strong research institute, with strengths in vascular biology,
and a new group in cardiovascular development and genetics, so the research program is going very well.”

“I’ve never before seen such an avalanche of worldclass physicians, scientists and researchers in such
a short period of time,” said another of those key recruits, Marco Costa, MD, PhD. Serving as Director
of Invasive Services and the Center for Research & Innovation, and one of the top interventional cardiologists in the world, he has elevated UH’s Cardiovascular Imaging to one of the best anywhere.
Dr. Costa, a native of Brazil who trained in the Netherlands, adds that this innovative team provides
doctors who combine leading-edge medical research with personalized care. “I don’t think there is any
other center in this country that has those two components together,” he said.

Three other high-profile recruits include another native Brazilian, Maurico Arruda, MD, Director of Electrophysiology Services and the AF Center, who is renowned for his ability to ablate or correct atrial fibrillation and complex arrhythmia conditions; Teresa Carman, MD, who oversees vascular medicine for the Institute and focuses on the vessels in the neck and head that cause stroke and the arteries in the lower extremities that cause peripheral vascular disease; and Richard Josephson, MD, Director of Cardiovascular-Pulmonary Rehabilitation and the Coronary Intensive Care Unit.

Dr. Carman will also be involved with creating a new vascular medicine fellowship which, along with a new
cardiovascular imaging fellowship, will augment the current heart and vascular fellow opportunities. Fellows, Dr. Simon explained, represent an outstanding recruitment pool as well. “They’re trained by us, they’re young and hungry,” he said. “Also, when you hire someone out of your own program, they’re usually a great value.”

To complement UH Case Medical Center’s expertise in stem cell biology and imaging, Dr. Simon recently
announced that Takayuki Asahara, MD, a pre-eminent researcher from the RIKEN Institute in Kobe, Japan, who codiscovered cardiovascular stem cells, joined the team.

Patients are also following Dr. Simon to the Harrington- McLaughlin Heart & Vascular Institute. From 2006 to 2007, there has been a 17 percent increase in patients in the eight-county region of Northeast Ohio. Currently, the Institute faces two key challenges in its drive to become one of the top heart and vascular centers of excellence in the country: recruiting enough cardiovascular physicians to meet the growing demand for services and identifying sustaining resources. The Harrington-McLaughlin gift will help achieve all of Dr. Simon’s goals.

“To give this amount of money away to one institution was a big decision for us,” Nancy Harrington revealed. “But we felt that it was such a great opportunity to meet the growing demands for services to help Dr. Simon and these brilliant doctors and scientists.”

To make an appointment with a physician, call toll-free 866-UH4-CARE (866.844.2273)