Dr. David E. Rogers, a leading scientist and medical educator, former head of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and dean of the Johns Hopkins medical school from 1968 until 1971, died Monday from colon cancer at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York. He was 68 and lived in Princeton, N.J.
Dr. Rogers was co-chairman of the National Commission on AIDS and a leader in health care reform who championed the rights of the disenfranchised.
During his tenure at Hopkins, he played a major role in changing how teaching institutions delivered medical care by developing health maintenance organizations (HMOs). He started the Columbia Medical Plan, a prepaid health care program in the Columbia area that later became part of the Columbia Free State Health System, which is a Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Maryland HMO. The plan's medical center became the Howard County General Hospital.
At the time he started the Columbia Medical Plan, he also began the health care system Hopkins operates in East Baltimore.
Dr. Rogers boosted the enrollment of minorities at the medical school, which had had only one black American graduate before his appointment. There were 31 black students at the time he resigned. He also established a Medical School Council of faculty members that still operates and two new departments, neurology and biomedical engineering.
In 1972, Dr. Rogers became the first head of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, then the largest philanthropy devoted to solving the health care problems of Americans.
As head of the $1.2 billion foundation, he was credited with developing the most systematic evaluation of projects of any foundation, bringing new standards of accountability and evaluation to its programs. "He saw philanthropy as a public trust that should be held to the highest standards," Dr. Stephen Schroeder, the foundation's current head, said.
Major projects focused on improving the delivery of health care, particularly to the poor and minority groups, infants, the elderly, the homeless and the mentally ill.
Dr. Rogers left the foundation in 1986. In 1987, he became the Walsh McDermott University Professor of Medicine at the Cornell University Medical College and a member of the honorary staff of the New York Hospital.
Dr. Robert M. Heyssel, emeritus president of the Johns Hopkins Health Systems and Hospital and a friend since 1959, said yesterday, "David was a very principled and idealistic man who really believed in doing good and really tried."
Dr. Thomas B. Turner, who preceded Dr. Rogers as dean of the medical school, described him as "extremely intelligent and personable" and said that, "The pattern he developed in East Baltimore and Columbia will provide a nucleus for the future" of providing health care.
Dr. Michael E. Johns, dean of the Hopkins medical school, said that Dr. Rogers "left an impact that endures to this day." He said that an award named for him will be presented for the first time in 1995 to two medical students who show "the highest standards of professionalism, medical ethics and community leadership."
Born in New York City, Dr. Rogers attended Ohio State University and graduated from Miami University of Ohio. After his graduation in 1948 from the Cornell University Medical College, he served an internship and residency at Hopkins Hospital then returned to Cornell to specialize in infectious diseases.
In 1959, at 33, he became head of medicine and physician in chief at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. At that time, he was the youngest doctor to hold such positions at any American medical school. In 1968, he joined Hopkins where he also was vice president for medicine and medical director of the hospital.
Dr. Rogers' first wife, the former Cora Jane Baxter, died in 1971. He is survived by his wife, the former Barbara Louise Lehan; a son, Gregory Rogers of Turners Falls, Mass.; two daughters, Dr. Anne Rogers of Richmond, Calif., and Julia Rogers of Philadelphia; and a sister, Natalie Fuchs of California.
Private services were planned, and plans for a memorial service were incomplete.