Penn Medicine is preparing to launch a Center for Applied Health Informatics to better facilitate and coordinate health data projects across the health system.
The center will bring together several entities at Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine that are engaged in health informatics. Many current projects are initiated by individual groups and sometimes informal coalitions. Penn Medicine said that creating an overarching center will better tie together these projects and the groups working on them to allow for more ongoing and efficient collaboration that benefits the health system.
“We hope to define the best practices for using health information and related data in our health system as well as outside of it,” said C. William Hanson III, M.D., Penn Medicine’s chief medical information officer, in a statement. “We now have a mechanism for maximizing the impact of the organizations across Penn Medicine that will be members of the center, with a focus on high-priority projects for the health system like developing the information architecture necessary for Penn Medicine to become a high reliability organization. That is a task that will take the skills and experience of all of us working together for it to succeed.”
The Center for Applied Health Informatics will seek to define and create the information structure needed to allow Penn Medicine to be more of a high reliability organization (HRO), a term that describes entities that operate in high-risk environments (like nuclear power, aviation, and, of course, health care) but are largely error-free.
Penn Medicine currently generates significant amounts of data and uses informatics in many areas to keep patients and staff safe, but the creation of this center will bolster this effort. The Center for Applied Health Informatics will allow for more real-time analysis of data and open up the possibility of a variety of new, enterprise-wide measures that will be approachable – and actionable – by anyone, from informatics professionals to leadership and frontline staff.
Among the groups set to collaborate within the new Center are Information Services, Clinical Effectiveness and Quality Improvement, the Center for Health Care Innovation, the Center for Evidence-Based Practice, the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Penn Computer Science, and the EHR Transformation team as well as the office of the chief medical information officer.
“Establishing this center is another bold step forward toward making advancements in patient care and accelerating research efforts,” said Michael Restuccia, the CIO of Penn Medicine, in a statement. “One exciting prospect is the center potentially being able to leverage its unique clinical informatics resources in combination with valuable genetic data for the benefit of our patients.”
By joining the various entities across Penn Medicine already generating and analyzing data, the Center for Applied Health Informatics will have the infrastructure in place to launch even more projects designed to improve practice and performance. For example, if the Center for Applied Health Informatics is called on to address an emerging health crisis – such as a future pandemic – leadership would meet to identify what parts of the informatics infrastructure need to be rapidly mobilized to address key needs.
“We think we’re stronger together,” said John D. McGreevey III, M.D., an associate chief medical information officer at Penn Medicine, in a statement. “There will be synergies by working together that each of our groups would not be able to achieve working alone. This is also about maximizing the ability of Penn Medicine to be nimble and ready to react to rapid changes in health care.”
Two major projects that the center will focus on in its inaugural year are telehealth expansion and the evolving needs in Penn Medicine’s COVID-19 pandemic response. Even before the center was conceived, the pandemic drove multiple center members to collaborate in new ways to solve urgent needs, like testing thousands of patients for COVID-19 and reliably reporting their results, along with providing trusted, always-available answers to frequently asked patient questions about COVID-19 via a chatbot.
