Penn Medicine is harnessing innovation and cutting-edge technology to health care, from developing new treatments to streamlining management and improving leadership.
2 min. read
Six million digital messages arrive in the inboxes of Penn Medicine clinicians each year. And while patients value the ease and convenience of being able to ask their questions through a portal any time, any day, the resulting tidal wave in the volume of messages adds to the pressures driving clinician burnout, says Jeffrey Moon, an emergency physician and assistant chief medical informatics officer at Penn Medicine. “Ten years ago, there were zero,” he says. “This is a burden that no one really saw coming.”
Raina Merchant (right) is an emergency physician and Penn Medicine’s chief transformation officer.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
The specific problem may have been unexpected, but the pattern is a persistent one. As new technologies emerge in medicine that can improve or even revolutionize treatment, they also often bring new challenges for people working on the front lines of health care.
And that’s a pattern that Kevin B. Mahoney, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, has set his sights on changing.
“Everything that is not working [in our systems and processes] is taking away from time at the bedside; it’s taking away from you being able to do your jobs,” Mahoney says.
So, since 2023, Penn Medicine has been developing a solution to streamline replies to patient messages with help from artificial intelligence (AI)—working with the electronic health record platform Epic to refine a tool that is now available to users of the system across the country.
Penn Medicine partnered with Epic to test an artificial intelligence-enabled patient message response module, in which messages drafted by AI must first be reviewed and modified as needed by a clinician before they are sent. More than 100 Penn Medicine primary care and specialty providers gave feedback on the responses to patient questions that were generated by the AI module, Moon says. The clinicians helped make the module’s responses less verbose and more authentic, as well as determine how to deploy the tool among staff to ensure sent messages were clinically sound, and to make sure it didn’t perpetuate bias.
While technologies like these are often the right answer to the challenge of making health care more meaningful and accessible for clinicians and patients alike, sometimes the solution is more about when and where to use them. A growing number of innovations at Penn Medicine are harnessing the concept of “anytime, anywhere” and connecting care across settings. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated the expansion of home care services, including telehealth offerings and home-based post-operative care.
Two longtime Penn Medicine doctors who bring creativity and a collaborative spirit, along with a deep understanding of the health care system, are key to driving these approaches forward. Together, Raina Merchant, an emergency physician who ran Penn Medicine’s Center for Digital Health, and Mitchell Schnall, the health system’s longtime Radiology chair, totaled more than half a century of experience at Penn Medicine before they were recently tapped for newly created roles. Merchant became the health system’s inaugural vice president and chief transformation officer in 2022, and Schnall was named its first senior vice president for data and technology solutions in 2024.
They are, together and separately, tasked with such aspirational projects as moving health care out of the hospital and into the home when appropriate, building more robust systems for online scheduling and accessibility, and leveraging artificial intelligence to ease the burden on health care providers.
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