During the past four years, we’ve been thrilled to welcome Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, and now, the Princeton Healthcare System, to Penn Medicine. In this issue of
System News, you’ll learn more about our newest hospital and its affiliates – their proud history in Central New Jersey and the programs that show their inspiring commitment to caring for their community – and get a look inside their beautiful facilities with an online photo slide show.
This has been an exciting period of thoughtful and strategic growth for our health system. Our footprint across the region has grown larger, and we are stronger and more dedicated to our mission than ever. Healthcare relationships across our region have shifted profoundly during this time, with new mergers and alliances shaping the names patients see on hospital signs and billboards.
Our path as a growing health system is unique. We’ve sought out the hospitals that are already leaders in our region’s “micromarkets” outside Philadelphia. Our newest hospitals are top-ranked in the areas they serve, long-recognized as destinations of choice for the best care in their region. They’re financially strong institutions. And like our three Philadelphia hospitals – the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, and Pennsylvania Hospital – they’re known for nursing excellence, each having received the prestigious Magnet designation, an honor conferred to less than 10 percent of hospitals across the nation.
We are stronger together, providing a health care continuum that can serve patients for both routine care and serious illnesses and injuries throughout their lives. Our leaders, physicians, nurses, and other staff are committed to working together, to learning from each other, and creating new systems of care that our peers across the country can aspire to.
Our connection to Princeton Healthcare is an especially natural evolution. Penn Medicine already had a strong presence in New Jersey – 25 percent of our patients live there, and a third of our staff does, too. Our new Penn Medicine Cherry Hill practice has brought new services like including radiation oncology to the suburbs of Southern New Jersey and seen patient activity triple since the expanded facility opened in the fall of 2016. Now, with Princeton Health on board, we’ve created a 50-mile corridor that makes it easy to access Penn Medicine outpatient and inpatient care throughout Southern and Central New Jersey.
We firmly believe that patients can heal faster when they are in their community and surrounded by their families. Our regional enterprise provides exceptional care in this setting, delivering half of the nearly 19,000 babies born each year in our hospitals and seeing patients through nearly 2 million of the 5 million outpatient visits that take place throughout our health system annually.
When patients in the Chester County, Lancaster, and Princeton communities need advanced care that isn’t available close to their homes – like organ transplants, proton therapy, or clinical trials – our integrated network provides easy access and seamless coordination for them to come to Philadelphia. We’ve put concierge services in place to smooth the path for patients who need to travel here, and our electronic medical records system and close care team collaborations ensure that patients can return home as soon as possible and continue seeing their local clinicians. This approach minimizes duplication of services – repeat tests, for instance – and allows us greater purchasing power for equipment, supplies, and medicines, all of which trims costs to patients, insurers, and our entire system.
This is a proven model of care that is beneficial to both patients and our health care system, and it’s paving the way for our future as an innovator in providing care to more patients, in more places.