Daniel Blum leads Sinai Hospital through the pandemic

There may be no pursuit more noble than the practice of medicine, said Daniel Blum, 55.

Blum is president of both Sinai Hospital and Grace Medical Center and senior vice president of LifeBridge Health. He lives in Baltimore’s Harbor East neighborhood.

“The people that I work with are heaven-sent,” Blum said in an email.

In addition to his hospitals’ talented and patient doctors and nurses, he said this also applied to other staff too, such as their “food service group: our care team includes people who cook our patients’ meals with care and attention, as well as kindhearted people who deliver those meals to our patients.

“Everyone who works here, regardless of the job they are in, maintains the same sense of passion and purpose,” Blum added.

The son of a Holocaust survivor, Blum grew up in New York City while attending both Hebrew school and a private Quaker school, which he found to have “significant overlap of value systems with Judaism.” He had a bar mitzvah and was confirmed at New York’s Central Synagogue, and he holds an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a graduate degree in public administration/healthcare administration.

While in New York, Blum witnessed the death of a young man on a sidewalk that left Blum with a new sense of purpose and a desire to make a difference by attending paramedic school.

“When I worked as a paramedic, I encountered daily frustrations with the organization and management of care and services across the healthcare and social service domain,” Blum said. “Rather than just complain, I thought I could get involved at other levels and participate in improvement efforts.”

After rising to a senior instructor, Blum made it his goal to earn promotions to successively bigger jobs and eventually set his professional sights on becoming a chief executive. He credits much of his success to luck, and to the mentors and colleagues who helped him along the way. While his journey to a position in Baltimore was a “circuitous” one, he said, he is “here because I believe in the mission of our organization. … And at a time of tremendous volatility and hatred, I see Sinai Hospital as an extraordinary platform to showcase our Jewish value system as we work to improve everyone’s wellbeing in our greater community.”

Whether by fate or luck, Blum began his position at Sinai Hospital in April of 2020, right around the start of lockdowns and quarantines. Needless to say, the work was not quite what he’d originally expected.

“The job that I have come into, and the plan I thought through in preparing to start this job, are completely different as compared to what I was anticipating,” Blum said. “In life we need to be flexible.

“Much of our success was realized through early implementation of our contingency plans and a shift into operating in an ‘emergency management’ mode- which cuts through a lot of bureaucracy,” Blum continued. “Another key to success rests with the leverage of our LifeBridge Health system, as we implemented a health system-wide approach and were able to benefit each LifeBridge Health entity through sharing and cooperation.”

Much of a typical work day for Blum is composed of an unending flurry of meetings, emails, phone calls and other types of interactions in the “people business,” as he put it. A great deal of his attention goes to COVID-19 response and the interference it brought to supply chains and the labor market.

“Any available time is spent rounding on staff and patients, and I am always touched by the stories I hear,” Blum said. “I take the greatest meaning from those moments where we were able to bring aid and comfort in moments of crisis.”