Enhancing symptom management for heart failure patients on hospice: While as serious an illness as advanced cancer, cancer patients benefit from more fully developed hospice programs. Late-stage heart failure care is often suboptimal, with inadequate and untimely symptom management and fatigue and breathlessness resulting in preventable emergency department visits and hospital readmissions. This project will develop a novel hospice heart failure program to improve symptom management for patients, increase teamwork between hospice and cardiology personnel, and provide for timely referrals to hospice. Team lead: Esther Pak, MD, fellow in Cardiovascular Medicine

Multidisciplinary cost-effective transitional care program for COPD patients: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is the third leading cause of death in the US. One of five patients admitted to the hospital with COPD is readmitted within 30 days, and up to half of these readmissions may be preventable. This project will develop a multi-team transitional care program for COPD patients that will include evidence-based interventions for high-risk hospitalized patients who are discharged to home. Team lead: Vivek Ahya, MD, vice chief, clinical affairs, Pulmonary, Allergy & Critical Care Division; associate professor of Medicine


Winning teams receive seed funding to develop and test new ideas using rapid experimentation methods, mentoring from advisors, support from partners across the institution aiming to enable new ideas and recognition from health system leaders at forums designed to celebrate and learn from early progress. The teams also have the opportunity to secure additional funding based on evidence and promise revealed by initial deployments of interventions.

“This year’s winning proposals represent an impressive range of innovative thinking about practices and services that can be transformed to make a meaningful impact for patients. These projects offer real potential for improving patient health, enhancing care experiences, and advancing high value care delivery,” said Roy Rosin, MBA, chief innovation officer at Penn Medicine. “We’ve seen over the past few years that the seed money, mentoring, and support from internal partners such as Penn Medicine’s information services team result in faster experimentation, more efficient evolution of new ideas and higher impact implementation.”

Including this year’s projects, the Innovation Accelerator Program has provided more than $2.5 million in funding for inventive projects over the past five years and about twice that in staff support. Past winners range from PEACE, a novel care model allowing women with signs of miscarriage to avoid unnecessary ER visits to new strategies reducing readmissions and the total cost of care for a range of complex, vulnerable patient populations. Several past projects have achieved recognition as best practices beyond Penn, including a connected health care model reducing readmissions and morbidity for women at risk for preeclampsia and personalized, automated antibiograms for improved antibiotic stewardship.

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