Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation in Philadelphia thas received the 11th Health Devices Achievement Award for excellence in health technology management and patient safety. The award recognizes innovative and effective initiatives of ECRI Institute member healthcare institutions to improve patient safety, reduce costs, or enable better strategic management of health technology.

Penn received the award for its technology platform, designed for creating custom apps to help clinicians better manage specific populations of patients. Penn's developers use the platform to rapidly create and fine-tune apps that bring relevant data to clinicians when they need it.

"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 at ECRI Institute, said in a statement. 

[Also: Top 10 healthcare technology advances for 2017, according to ECRI]

Penn's team has used the platform to design apps such as those that alert care providers when a patient's critical medication order is expiring, reminds providers to perform an extubation risk screening and one that identifies patients who frequently use emergency department services so they can then be provided targeted services.

The platform extracts information from electronic health records 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 a dashboard.

ECRI Institute also recognized three organizations as finalists for the award: Norton Healthcare of  Louisville, Kentucky, Canada’s Service New Brunswick and St. Luke's Health System in Boise, Idaho.

Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com

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