Awards and Accolades Received in 2021

Becker's Hospital Review released the 2021 edition of the "102 hospital and health system CIOs to know" annual list. Mike Restuccia, senior vice president and chief information officer at Penn Medicine, was named as one of the featured CIO’s in this edition.

The executives featured on this list lead technology and health IT initiatives for hospitals and health systems across the U.S. They oversee EHR installations, cybersecurity, data management and telemedicine services. Many have built robust technology departments and teams, including clinical and non-clinical experts. The individuals and institutions featured here have received recognition from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.

Call it a nine-peat. Every year for the last nine years, Penn Medicine has made the CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives) Healthcare’s Most Wired list. In addition to making a Most Wired list for nine consecutive years, this year’s achievement is the 17th time overall that Penn Medicine has achieved Most Wired status, a designation recognizing hospitals and health systems that optimize the use of information technology to support care delivery. CHIME announced the accomplishment today. Read More

Penn Medicine's Predictive Healthcare Team was recognized as one of seven finalists for the CMS AI Challenge. The research was conducted by Dr. Emily J. MacKay, Dr. Michael D. Stubna, and Penn Medicine's Predictive Healthcare Team using a machine learning risk model to predict adverse outcomes from medical and surgical treatments. The results of researched were published by PLOS: a nonprofit Open Access publisher that empowers researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine. The intended use of this system is to enable informed conversations between patients and physicians, resulting in better understood expectations, and personalized care plans.

Penn Medicine Information Services team became a semi-finalist in the 2021 Healthcare Innovation Innovator Awards program as they were able to develop a way to allow clinicians and genetic counselors to enter orders within the EHR and electronically interface them with an outside lab. The interface then transmits discrete results into the EHR, segregating genetic variants, which allows clinicians to make better informed clinical decisions. Solving this business problem integrates the clinical data and enables clinicians to review results as part of the chart. "We became one of the first organizations in the country to enable the import of discrete genetic test results into our EHR, working alongside Epic," Landgraf says. Very few healthcare institutions have implemented genetic testing results into the EHR, and Penn Medicine now has several outside laboratories lining up to complete integration of genetic lab tests within its EHR and other health systems have asked how they completed this project in a relatively short time frame.

Penn Medicine earned a Future Edge 50 Award for the Conversation Connect project. This project redesigned a clinical workflow with a machine learning algorithm that automatically flags patients who would benefit most from a timely conversation about their end-of-life goals and wishes, and prompts clinicians to have these conversations before patients' illnesses progress too far.. The project was led by Penn Medicine's Predictive Healthcare Team with the Abramson Cancer Center and was made up of a cross-disciplinary team of oncologists, clinical informaticists, human factors scientists, data scientists, and software engineers. Conversation Connect is an incredible program that helps oncologists meet seriously ill patients' goals of care," said Michael Draugelis, chief data scientist at Penn Medicine. "We're incredibly proud of the compassionate conversations that have resulted from this re-imagining of the workflow, and this program serves as a model of how to use AI to deliver value in healthcare." The program has resulted in an improved patient care experience, and the reduction of missed opportunities for important conversations.