PHILADELPHIA - For the second year in a row, Penn Medicine has been ranked in the top 10 in this year’s InformationWeek Elite 100, an annual list of U.S. businesses from all industries that use innovative and leading information technologies to run their business. Penn Medicine placed fourth this year across all industries and is being recognized for the implementation of Penn Signals, a real-time big data platform used to generate multiple predictive applications delivered to clinical teams. The success of this project is directly related to the collaborative efforts of the Information Services department and the Office of the Chief Medical Information Officer.
“Recognition of Penn Medicine by Information Week for this prestigious award further validates the collaborative spirit that exists between Information Services and our clinical community to significantly enable the advancement of care to our patients,” said Michael Restuccia, vice president and chief information officer for Penn Medicine.
Penn Signals was designed by the Penn Medicine data science team led by chief data scientist Mike Draugelis. It is built on an open source technology platform that combines data points from an individual patient’s electronic medical record with data from the Penn Data Store (a data repository containing years of clinical data from many patients).
Together, these sources are used to define patterns in patient conditions and inform the attending clinicians of best treatment practices. This powerful mix of data, clinical expertise, and cutting-edge methods in predictive data science combine to provide secure text alerts that prompt clinicians to take quick action to intervene when they have the very best chance of making a difference.
Penn Signals was first used to create a way for clinical staff to better monitor heart failure patients. The Penn Signals Heart Failure project, lead by Jo Anne Fante-Gallagher, director of Quality & Safety Heart & Vascular Service Line, allows enrolled patients to more smoothly transition to home care after being discharged. The information collected via Penn Signals sends alerts to care teams on patients who are hospitalized so patients can receive targeted interventions from the department readmitting the patient.
Penn Medicine Information Services’ fourth place ranking was announced publicly May 2nd at the InformationWeek Conference in Las Vegas. This is InformationWeek’s 28th year identifying and honoring the nation's businesses who demonstrate the most innovative use of information technology. The InformationWeek Elite 100 research tracks the technology-based investments, strategies, and results of some of the best-known organizations in the country.
The full list can be found on http://www.informationweek.com/elite100.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.