After more than four years of construction, preparation and celebration marked the final weeks before the opening of the Pavilion, Penn Medicine’s state-of-the art new 1.5-million-square-foot inpatient facility at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
In the months before the building opened for patients, every employee who would work there – approximately 10,000 people – underwent a thorough and mandatory training in this new facility. The training team helped every department and discipline create its own specific, customized training plans, 26 in all. In addition, three dress rehearsals were held between August and October to bring multidisciplinary teams together. At each rehearsal, the clinical teams and support staff practice three scripted “day in the life of” scenarios commonly performed and specific to their needs – some with added complexity.
Penn Medicine lit up the night sky over Philadelphia with a spectacular show of 300 drones in celebration of the Pavilion. The dynamic light show was visible from up to five miles from the launch site over Fairmount Park’s Lemon Hill area a few days before the building’s opening. The drone show featured shapeshifting patterns of light that outlined the Penn shield as well as the shape of the Pavilion building itself. It also included interactive components – such as a “QR code in the sky” scannable from up to three-quarters of a mile away – to reach a website to learn more about the transformation of medical care underway in the Pavilion.
“There are medical marvels we’ll never seen in this lifetime. Then there are those that arrive ahead of their time,” musician John Legend narrates the sweeping video as the viewer’s vantage point floats down from the sky above the Pavilion and follows a patient rolling through the Emergency Department doors. A unique fly-through drone tour shows a five-minute journey through a day in the life of the new building. As the social media posts accompanying the video said, “You’ve never seen a hospital like this. And you’ve never seen a hospital… LIKE THIS.”
Read more stories about the Pavilion here.