Close your eyes and picture the future of health care. Is it a Star Trek technology vision – handheld tricorders that heal wounds and diagnose infections instantly, a 3D scan of a tumor instantly projected in midair?
A lot of future forecasts tend to focus on technology. We’ve heard plenty in the past few years about how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and expanded telemedicine everywhere. Tech companies, as the story goes, are nipping at the heels of the health care industry, hoping to “disrupt” the traditional ways of providing care. At Penn Medicine’s new inpatient Pavilion, opened last fall, part of the excitement indeed comes from cutting-edge technologies that enable everything from minimally invasive surgeries to controlling the electronic privacy glass in patient rooms.
But if you ask Kevin B. Mahoney, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, the future isn’t about technology. It’s about “meeting people where they’re at.”
Unlike almost every other academic health system, Penn Medicine has invested over a span of decades in owning and excelling at what Mahoney calls all “four sites of care”: hospitals, outpatient clinics, virtual care, and home care.
For patients, that means Penn Medicine seeks to deliver care in the most appropriate setting for their needs. Why spend a night or longer in the hospital if you can visit an outpatient location to have your procedure and be home within a few hours? Why even take those hours off of work to drive to the clinic if your doctor can diagnose you and prescribe your medication after a brief video call, or if a physical therapist can come and help you do exercises right in your own living room?
This is what the future looks like at Penn Medicine: Being ready to care for patients in the right places at the right times.
In this framework, technology is still important – it pushes the boundaries of what care is possible, guiding the way to treating and curing diseases in the most advanced ways. It also changes the picture of where a person can receive the best possible care that is also most comfortable. Thanks to advances in telemedicine technology, virtual care continues to grow in popularity as an option. Thanks to high-tech portable infusion pumps, more patients can conveniently and safely receive biologic infusions and chemotherapy infusions – for cancer and multiple sclerosis, for examples – at home. Advances in surgical technologies help explain why numerous procedures, from knee replacement to cataract removal, that used to require a lengthy hospital stay, are commonly done in just a day now.
Lots of other factors shape the future, too. Insurance companies pay more for some types and sites of care than for others, and market factors like hospital closures and mergers affect how many patients line up in need. These are all elements that Penn Medicine is working to address.
By operating all four sites of care as an integrated system, we’re poised to provide each patient care across settings that are seamlessly connected – maximizing comfort and convenience, and increasing access – even as the future brings changes we can’t yet anticipate.
In the Fall/Winter issue of Penn Medicine magazine, we take a detailed tour of two of the four sites of care: Home care is a growing part of Penn Medicine’s operations that patients are increasingly finding a comfortable complement to their care at other sites. Another feature story shows a typical day in the life of the Pavilion, the new inpatient building of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where patients go when they need the most complex and advanced treatments and surgeries for cancer, neurological and cardiovascular conditions, and more.
As you read, keep in mind this larger context: The hospital and home aren’t discrete domains, but different places in a journey toward a changing future. At Penn Medicine, you can be assured that the future of health care will meet you where and when you need it.