Earlier this year, Penn Medicine's Center for Health Equity Advancement (CHEA) created a Social Needs Response Team which worked with local small catering businesses and a community-based food access organization to deliver over 2,700 boxes of food to vulnerable households. Building on this success – and thanks to a generous contribution from the TD Charitable Foundation -- CHEA will launch a Food Access Support Technology (FAST) platform early next year to help facilitate a coordinated city-wide response to food insecurity in effort to track and improve health outcomes for vulnerable patients.
CHEA was created in 2019 to help ensure high quality patient and family-centered care for all populations, promote workforce diversity, and cultivate safe and inclusive learning and clinical environments.