I hate math, but I love statistics.
One of my favorite statistics is more of an exercise in understanding the enormity of large numbers, and it goes like this: Say a friend or loved one has a baby. If you gave that baby a dollar every second, it would be a millionaire within about eleven and a half days — but that baby wouldn’t be a billionaire until it was almost thirty-two years old.
Putting aside the fact that we’d all like to be that baby, I’ve always thought that exercise is a great way to illustrate just how huge numbers can be without us even realizing it. The difference between “one million” and “one billion” is only one letter, but on a number line it’s so massive a gap you’d have trouble really illustrating it.
Going small to large like that is plenty of fun, but — and here’s where I bring it around — I’ve found going large to small is a great way to really break down some of the things we accomplish here at Penn Medicine.
Take, for example, the number of outpatient visits we as an institution receive in a given year. The most recent count, according to Facts and Figures 2015, was 2,837,864. I think almost anybody would recognize that as a huge number, of course, but I don’t know if its true enormity is apparent until you break it down a bit further: Those 2,837,864 outpatient visits work out to around 7,775 per day, 324 per minute, or 5 every second.
Looking at the same source, we can also see there were 11,050 births last year here at Penn Medicine. That’s 30 a day, or a little over one birth every hour. (It’s also pretty close to the average daily ridership of the Girard Avenue Line.)
And how do we accommodate all of those outpatient visits and births? Well, it helps that we have plenty of space. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania alone, for example, is a 1.9 million-square-foot complex. That’s almost 33 football fields’ worth of space. Theoretically, every team in the NFL could hold an individual practice in that space, all at the same time, with still an entire football field’s worth of space left over. Of course, their cleats probably wouldn’t do so well on our tile floors, but that’s why we have an orthopaedic department.
There are plenty of other huge numbers concerning Penn Medicine to break down, and perhaps that’s a topic for yet another blog post. For now, though, hopefully I’ve helped illustrate the scope of what we do here.