PHILADELPHIA — Penn Medicine is now home to one of the first fully accredited Pulmonary Hypertension Care Centers (PHCCs) in the country, with its Pulmonary Hypertension/Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. The Pulmonary Hypertension Association (PHA) just announced its first six accredited programs as part of their efforts to improve overall quality of care and ultimately improve outcomes of patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH), specifically pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) — a rare and debilitating disease of the lungs that affects the functioning of the heart and can lead to right heart failure.
PHCC accreditation signifies that a PH program is dedicated to making a proper diagnosis and has the capacity to appropriately and comprehensively manage PH patients according to a set of criteria established by the PHA Scientific Leadership Council — 28 global leaders in the field of pulmonary hypertension. These criteria have also been developed with input from many PH stakeholders including physicians, allied health care professionals, patients and PHA leadership and are considered essential to delivering high-quality care for these complex patients.
“It’s an honor to have Penn’s Pulmonary Hypertension/Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program recognized in this way,” said Steven Kawut, MD, MS, associate professor of Medicine and director of the program, who’s also working with the PHA on a new PH patient registry. “It’s thanks to our extraordinarily talented and dedicated clinicians, researchers and staff that we’ve been able to become an accredited center for the care of patients with PH.”
Penn and the other five PHCCs were vetted by a rigorous process that included a detailed application and a comprehensive site visit, with ultimate adjudication by a committee of more than 20 health professionals with vast experience in caring for PH patients. For more information about the accreditation, visit www.phassociation.org.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.