You may have seen the headlines: Tech companies like Google and Amazon are moving into health care, taking on challenges from overhauling health care data infrastructure to improving disease management. They’re also making headlines for recruiting leaders from health systems across the country. Their strategies make sense: their leaders know that entering a new industry requires a tremendous amount of highly specific experience in order to be successful.
We’re seeing the fruits of that approach at Penn Medicine every day, as we’ve more deeply explored digital and data-based innovations to optimize patient care, clinician workflows, and efforts that help patients stay on track managing their health even when they’re not in our hospitals and clinics.
Hires from outside of our own industry have proven a crucial complement to our own longstanding clinical, research, and business expertise.
Take, for example, Roy Rosin, MBA, Penn Medicine’s chief innovation officer. Rosin began his career in the software industry as the vice president of Innovation for Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and Quicken. At Penn Medicine, he and the team in the Center for Health Care Innovation have identified and developed dozens of projects through programs like the Innovation Accelerator — a venue for career clinicians turning their front line insights into new care models through collaborations with data scientists, coders, designers, behavioral economists and others with skill sets not historically associated with medicine.
Another tech talent walking our halls began his career at Lockheed Martin. Michael Draugelis, now the chief data scientist for Penn Medicine Predictive Health, worked on everything from missile defense systems to the Hubble Space Telescope. But when he was assigned to look into health care analytics, Draugelis developed a passion for the intricacies of the industry and knew that his best work could be done here at Penn Medicine.
His knowledge of machine learning — coupled with partnerships between Penn Medicine researchers and clinicians and the team that he built — has enabled Penn Medicine to make great strides. Chief among them are a new system using machine learning to warn clinicians earlier than ever before of the risk of patients developing sepsis, and a prediction model for diverting lung cancer patients from preventable emergency department visits through other interventions.
Many of the leaps that we are making in the delivery of care are only possible through these types of partnerships. For example, our palliative care teams knew that many patients admitted to our hospitals with serious, advanced-stage illnesses, weren’t having conversations early enough — or at all — about their goals and priorities in case their condition worsened. In addition to educating front-line physicians about how and when to suggest a palliative care consultation, Chief of Palliative Care Nina O’Connor, MD, asked, could we use data science to both identify and better aid the patients who would most benefit from these conversations?
To answer that question, clinical teams and data scientists came together to develop a system. The process of developing this new tool, called Palliative Connect, drew on a diverse set of skills from every member of the team. The data scientists used machine learning to identify patients who would benefit the most from talking with the palliative care team — but they realized that this wasn’t just a computer programming problem. Working closely with the clinicians and a team member specializing in human behavioral science, they developed workflows for palliative care specialists to use the tool seamlessly in clinical settings.
After a pilot showed success on every front, the system is now employed at both HUP and Pennsylvania Hospital. And because the team used its combined technical and clinical expertise to build measurement into the system’s design, they are continuing to gather data to refine the system, and even extend its impact in more places. Through engagement with the Innovation Center as part of the Innovation Accelerator, Dr. O’Connor was then able to leverage this progress with data science to identify patients for a novel care model called Advanced Heart Care at Home. This program combines state-of-the-art care for heart failure (including remote monitoring and IV diuretics) with compassionate palliative care in the comfort of each patient’s home.
Just five years ago, bringing artificial intelligence and predictive analytics into patient care on a daily basis felt like science fiction. But broadly interdisciplinary teams like the ones behind Palliative Connect and Advanced Heart Care at Home are making it a reality throughout Penn Medicine. More and more, when our employees think about who can help them find a solution, they’re not just thinking of others within their same discipline.
As tech companies venture farther into health care, we can expect to see innovations coming out of their organizations as well. We can also expect to partner with them to tackle some of our biggest health care challenges. The talent fueling the future of medicine is diverse. Often, we started down different career paths, but we converge in pursuit of improving the health of people across the world.