The Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation in Philadelphia, PA, has been awarded the 11th Health Devices Achievement Award from the ECRI Institute for developing a clinician alert app-development platform which improves health technology management and patient safety.
The award recognizes innovative and effective initiatives undertaken by ECRI Institute member healthcare institutions to improve patient safety, reduce costs, or otherwise facilitate better strategic management of health technology.
The ECRI Institute recognized Penn Medicine's Center for Health Care Innovation for a technology platform the organization designed for creating custom apps to help clinicians better manage specific populations of patients. With the platform, Penn's developers can rapidly create and refine apps that bring relevant data to clinicians at the time they need it—enabling continuously improved patient care, according to a press release.
"We hear from many hospitals that are searching for ways to get key clinical data from multiple IT systems to support decision-making, and Penn Medicine has created a system that does it well," David Jamison, executive director, health technology evaluation and safety, ECRI Institute, said in a statement. "The innovative approach Penn Medicine took to identify patient needs is a good example for hospitals nationwide."
Penn's team has used the platform to design a variety of apps, including those that alert care providers when a patient's critical medication order is expiring; remind providers to perform an extubation risk screening and identify patients who frequently use emergency department services so that those patients can then be provided targeted services, including mental health access or transportation vouchers.
"We understand the importance of helping healthcare providers know when action is needed for patients they are responsible for, and this platform makes that possible," Katherine Choi, M.D., clinical innovation manager, Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, said in a prepared statement.
The platform proactively extracts information from electronic health records (EHRs) and other data sources to identify patients who require a particular intervention. This information is processed, formatted, and communicated to the patient's care provider, either through a secure text or email or via a dashboard that the provider can access.
"This platform allows us to continually make improvements to the applications, be sensitive to clinical workflow, and meet the needs of our patients," Yevgeniy Gitelman, M.D., clinical informatics manager and a developer on the team, said.
Gitelman also added, "If clinicians need to know when a specific action is required for a targeted patient population, we can quickly and efficiently add applications to test new interventions, using the infrastructure we've put in place.”
ECRI Institute also recognized three additional organizations as finalists for the 11th Health Devices Achievement Award:
Norton Healthcare (Louisville, KY) - “Strategic Planning in the Clinical Engineering Realm”
Service New Brunswick (Fredericton, NB, Canada) - “IPM Completion Rates: Hitting the Mark with 100 Percent”
St. Luke's Health System (Boise, ID) – “A 'Role Model' Approach to Creating a Highly Reliable Recall Management Program”
