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“The world of mobile and digital health has created an environment where rolling these programs out is easier and more interactive,” Anish Agarwal, MD, said. “Time will certainly tell in how these incentives can be used to in equitable and sustainable ways.”

Three Penn Medicine projects tied to its Center for Health Care Innovation were chosen by Independence Blue Cross to receive Clinical Care Innovation Grants. These grants are awarded annually to programs in the Philadelphia area that “improve the health and well-being” of patients.

By making a game out of getting their daily steps, new research points to the possibility that people with diabetes could be nudged toward increasing their physical activity, with changes lasting for a full year.

Twice as many eligible patients got screened for hepatitis C when it was already ordered for them compared to those who had to request it, according to a new study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The U.S. government’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, usually abbreviated as WIC, saw a jump in enrollment of nearly 8 percent in states that implemented a federally mandated switch from paper vouchers to electronic benefit cards (EBTs), according to a study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Through simple text messaging we highlight a method which gives clinicians the information they need to reduce prescribing and manage pain,” said co-lead author Anish Agarwal, MD, a clinical innovation manager in the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health and an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine.

Machine learning can be used to comb through online reviews of substance use treatment facilities to home in on qualities that are important to patients but remain hard to capture via formal means, such as surveys, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania show.

Researchers saw a fourfold decline in the rate of patients who needed to go back to the hospital after total hip or knee replacements if they were enrolled in a program that used wearable step counters and conversational text messaging to keep tabs on recovery.

Neuroscientists don’t know precisely what brain circuits control wakefulness and sleep, nor exactly how drugs for general anesthesia affect those circuits. But a new study from Penn Medicine researchers brings neuroscience a step closer to solving that important conundrum.