The Center for Applied Health Informatics 

The Penn Medicine Center for Applied Health Informatics (the Center) brings together key groups across the health system to address high priority health care challenges.

Health informatics is the field that pursues the effective creation, aggregation, and use of health information for problem solving and decision making.

Within the context of the Center, physicians, scientists, and other health care professionals combine their expertise in applied health informatics to develop interdisciplinary, strategic solutions to pressing challenges facing Penn Medicine. These individuals represent multiple health system and university groups that work in the applied health informatics space.

Ultimately, the Center aims to improve health outcomes and health system operations by leveraging and coordinating the information, technology, and talents already available within Penn Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania. Some of the past, present, and future projects that advance these goals include  

  • Designing and implementing Penn Medicine’s COVID-19 response

  • Creating the information foundation for Penn Medicine’s HRO journey

  • Connecting groups as Penn Medicine’s applied health informatics hub

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Penn Medicine personnel from different departments and centers rapidly mobilized and developed new tools and processes to address unprecedented health care needs. These successful collaborations involved novel health information, workflow, and technology challenges and demonstrated how by working together, Penn Medicine’s teams can achieve far more than would be possible if they were working independently. Penn Medicine’s COVID-19 testing programs, telehealth expansion, and the ongoing vaccination campaign are just a few of the areas where people, information, and technology came together, rapidly creating informatics solutions for a constantly evolving situation.

The Center will lead creation of the information foundation that will enable Penn Medicine to become a high reliability organization (HRO)—one that operates in high-risk environments but that makes fewer mistakes than expected given its size and scope of work.

Ultimately, this information foundation will make actionable, real-time information about health system performance and patient care available to decision-makers in a way that has never before been possible, allowing for swift responses to emerging trends, prevention of harm before harm occurs, and readiness for what lies ahead.

The Center will serve as a hub for applied health informatics at Penn Medicine. In addition to improving outcomes within Penn Medicine, the Center will have a broader reach: it will share its findings and best practices in applied health informatics with other health care organizations through publications, conference presentations, and other outreach and scholarship. 

Priorities

  • Coordinate and align informatics work throughout the health system 
  • Design, develop, and implement scalable informatics solutions that impact high priority health system challenges and initiatives
  • Anticipate and create the informatics infrastructure needed for the health care needs of tomorrow
  • Ensure that informatics-driven changes are having the desired impact on health system goals

Member Groups

Several groups from across Penn Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania are members of the Center for Applied Health Informatics. Bringing talent and expertise in areas such as system implementation, database management, biomedical informatics, health care innovation, and more, our member groups have already collaborated on multiple high priority applied health informatics projects. 

The member groups of the Center for Applied Health Informatics include

The Center for Evidence-based Practice (CEP)
The Center for Health Care Innovation (CHCI)
Clinical Effectiveness and Quality Improvement (CEQI)
EHR Transformation
Information Services (IS)
Office of the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO)
Penn Computer and Information Science (CIS)
Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI)

If you are interested in learning more about our Center, please contact us.