A group of physicians including Todd Hecht and Ryan Greysen walk down a hospital hallway

Beyond buildings: a blueprint for accessible care

  • Kevin Mahoney
  • June 25, 2025

About 20 years ago Ralph Muller, my predecessor as CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, asked me to help create the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, across the street from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania at the site that used to be the Philadelphia Civic Center. At the time, when I told my wife, she laughed. “You can't hang a picture up straight,” she said. “How could you possibly do it?”  

But I learned, and learned by listening, by being curious, and by asking questions. It’s a leadership lesson that I share with our staff to this day: You don't have to accept things the way they’ve always been. Build them the way you want them to be. Use your intellectual curiosity and your vision to make the world that our patients need. 

During my nearly 30 years with Penn Medicine, I’ve had the privilege to contribute to many design projects across our enterprise. From landmark buildings to routine renovations, I’ve come to see this work not only as construction, but rather as the architecture of care.  

Each and every project we take on represents our guiding belief at Penn Medicine that people should be able to access treatment when and where they need it. State-of-the-art facilities and flagship centers matter, but modern health care is more than that: Increasingly, it’s a strategy to build connections that span entire communities.  

When we think of our plans as the architecture of care, it means we’re growing in ways that ensure entire regions are supported by doctors, nurses, and other clinicians and that treatments are always within reach.  

Making care easier and accessible 

Portrait of Kevin Mahoney, Chief Executive Officer, University of Pennsylvania Health System 

In the United States, receiving health care has become a web of difficult decisions to untangle, complicated by long waits, disrupted schedules, travel, and the heavy burden of illness. 

That is why we are investing in not only brick-and-mortar hospitals, but also multi-specialty outpatient centers, telehealth, and home care to make sure Penn Medicine is available to patients in the right place at the right time. We’re bringing care that has been changing lives for centuries to facilities around the corner.  

As hospitals have closed nationwide, the harm communities face has become all too clear. Remaining health organizations are overwhelmed; emergency room volumes surge; and patients may delay or forgo medical attention altogether.  

For example, the recent shutdown of Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital in Delaware County, PA, has shown the dire consequences of losing essential health services. Amid the crisis, Penn Medicine Graduate Medical Education and Chester County Hospital teams launched a family medicine residency program a year ahead of schedule to hire 26 physicians-in-training who were displaced by the closure.  

The move will increase the number of primary care physicians in the county. Residents will complete their inpatient training at Chester County Hospital and provide outpatient care at two locations that serve approximately 24,000 patients annually. These sites provide comprehensive services, including pediatrics, women’s health, adult medicine, geriatrics, and more.  

In addition, Penn Medicine hired 14 former Crozer Health residents specializing in internal medicine or obstetrics and gynecology to train at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Hospital. The overall rapid response reflects Penn Medicine’s broader focus on making it even simpler for patients to receive care. 

Because every mile and every minute counts 

Recently, we welcomed Doylestown Health to the health system, extending care to families in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, and broke ground on Penn Medicine Montgomeryville, a 162,000-square-foot multispecialty outpatient center opening in 2027. These steps will help bring our institution’s deep clinical and research expertise directly into Montgomery and Bucks counties. We’re proud to serve so many patients at similar outpatient facilities in Radnor, Southern Chester County, the Lancaster Suburban Pavilion, Cherry Hill, and more. These centers increasingly bring the full breadth of Penn Medicine’s excellence into one space: primary care, heart and vascular, orthopedics, neuroscience, women’s health, surgical consultations, and more.  

For cancer and other serious illnesses that require months of therapy, every mile and minute counts. One way we are alleviating the toll of long-distance travel is by expanding the Abramson Cancer Center in Princeton, NJ. Currently under development on the Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center campus in Plainsboro, the $401 million project will include a 195,000-square-foot facility and a 31,000-square-foot outpatient imaging site.  

We’re also adding a fourth proton therapy location—the Roberts Proton Therapy Center at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in West Philadelphia—to help more patients take advantage of this highly complex and sophisticated therapy in a way that fits their lives. 

The places and the people who make a patient’s experience great 

When Penn Medicine opens and renovates buildings, we always consider how our spaces are designed to support a patient’s journey—to be warm and welcoming, filled with natural light where possible, to inspire with art and beauty. 

Our goal is to design settings where doctors, nurses, and others can do their best work and build places that foster comfort and nurture resilience.  

To make these promises real, we don’t just ask what care should look like. We ask what it should feel like. That deeper work happens everywhere, across our system, every day. 

At Penn Medicine, when we speak of the architecture of care, we mean more than facilities or form. We mean comfort and reassurance. We mean access and ease. We mean treatment that isn’t delivered by chance but rather cultivated by design, driven by empathy, and reimagined as what care can and should be: innovative, thoughtful, and purpose-driven.  

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