Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation in Philadelphia, PA, has been named the winner of the ECRI Institute 11th Health Devices Achievement Award. The award recognizes innovative and effective initiatives undertaken by ECRI Institute member healthcare institutions to improve patient safety, reduce costs, or otherwise facilitate better strategic management of health technology.
The award recognizes Penn Medicine’s Center for Health Care Innovation’s technology platform it designed for creating custom apps to help clinicians better manage specific populations of patients. With the platform, Penn’s developers can rapidly create and refine apps that bring relevant data to clinicians at the time they need it—enabling continuously improved patient care.
Penn’s team has used the platform to design a variety of apps, including those that:
- Alert care providers when a patient’s critical medication order is expiring
- Remind providers to perform an extubation risk screening
- Identify patients who frequently use emergency department services so that those patients can then be provided targeted services, including mental health access or transportation vouchers
“We understand the importance of helping healthcare providers know when action is needed for patients they are responsible for, and this platform makes that possible,” said Katherine Choi, MD, clinical innovation manager, Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation.
The platform proactively extracts information from electronic health records (EHRs) and other data sources to identify patients who require a particular intervention. This information is processed, formatted, and communicated to the patient’s care provider, either through a secure text or email or via a dashboard that the provider can access.
“This platform allows us to continually make improvements to the applications, be sensitive to clinical workflow, and meet the needs of our patients,” says Yevgeniy Gitelman, MD, clinical informatics manager and a developer on the team.
“If clinicians need to know when a specific action is required for a targeted patient population, we can quickly and efficiently add applications to test new interventions, using the infrastructure we’ve put in place,” adds Gitelman.
