PHILADELPHIA — For the sixth straight year – and 14th time overall – Penn Medicine is the recipient of a Health Care’s Most Wired Award, which recognizes hospitals and health systems that embrace and maximize technology to support the delivery of care.
The award was announced today during the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Fall CIO Forum in San Diego. C. William Hanson III, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer at Penn Medicine, accepted the award.
“Being named a ‘Most Wired’ organization for the sixth year in a row signifies Penn Medicine’s ongoing investment in implementing leading technology to advance the care we provide to our patients,” said Michael Restuccia, senior vice president and chief information officer at Penn Medicine.
Penn Medicine has won the award every year since 2013 and also was named to the list from 2001 through 2008.
Achieving such high-level success speaks to the quality of Penn Medicine’s Information Services (IS) department, Restuccia pointed out. “This places our IS team and operational partners in rarified territory as few organizations have achieved such a consistent level of technology adoption and recognition,” he said.
The Most Wired Awards have been given out for 20 years, previously by Hospitals & Health Networks. This year, they were taken over by CHIME, and their focus shifted from only highlighting health systems’ technology adoption to now including how well organizations closed technology gaps. The goal is to promote the strategic use of healthcare information technology on a global scale.
“Healthcare IT has the potential to revolutionize care around the world, but to meet that potential, it must be used strategically,” said CHIME’s president and CEO, Russell Branzell.
Restuccia identified two main areas where Penn Medicine significantly advanced its technological scope since winning the award last year: patient engagement and the exchange of patient data with external partners.
And although there’s much to be proud of in Penn Medicine’s run of excellence, thoughts are already on the next steps. One goal involves leveraging technology to further simplify how patients engage in their care, and the other is focused on transforming the electronic health record, an initiative which Penn Medicine announced in October.
“Going forward, we have our eyes set on integrating genomic data into our electronic health record” Restuccia said.
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.