Providing information technology support to Penn Medicine’s mission of world class patient care and research is the primary objective of the Penn Medicine Information Services (“IS”) department. In recent years, significant efforts have been made to implement and integrate applications as well as acquire and distribute codified patient data throughout the clinical and research arena.
As many of these solutions are now in place across the Penn Medicine enterprise, the focus shifts to using this data to make more informed decisions from a patient care, research and medical education perspective.
Evidence of these efforts can be found in the development of an enterprise data warehouse, Penn Data Store, where aggregated patient data from all patient care settings may be utilized to support patient care, community health, quality initiatives and research criteria. In addition, best practice clinical alerts, clinical decision support and clinical reminders are now consistently to enhance caregiver decisions.
Finally, the Information Services department’s support of Penn Medicine’s genomic efforts and linking this data to drive personalized patient care is a new frontier that Penn Medicine and several other leading-edge organizations are aggressively pursuing. The past several years for Penn Medicine has been very exciting and has served to put a solid foundation in place for an even more exciting and ground-breaking upcoming years for the Penn Medicine Information Services department.