At the Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation (CHTI), our mission is to catalyze change across Penn Medicine communities to advance health and reimagine health care delivery for dramatically better outcomes.
We view innovation and transformation as distinct but interconnected areas of focus. Innovation is about creating and testing novel solutions, whether through new technologies, data-driven approaches, or behavioral interventions. Transformation is about embedding those innovations into the fabric of our health system, ensuring they lead to lasting, systemic change.
CHTI was founded in 2012 as a vehicle to design, validate, and disseminate new approaches to care and encourage a culture of innovation at Penn Medicine. Originally called the Center for Health Care Innovation (CHCI), CHTI was renamed in 2023 to underscore our renewed emphasis on reshaping care at magnitude.
Vision
CHTI supports Penn Medicine’s strategic vision and its five pillars:
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Lead with humanity in everything we do
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Make breathtaking discoveries and put them to work
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Simplify care delivery and place it within reach
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Develop people for great accomplishment
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Uplift our community, our environment, and ourselves
Our work touches on all these pillars but concentrates on the third – we strive to make care easy for patients, clinicians, and all those touched by our health system.
Focus Areas
To advance Penn Medicine’s goal of simplifying care and placing it within reach, we concentrate our health system–based initiatives within four focus areas.
Emerging care models
Delivering extraordinary care with new pathways and technological innovation
Burden reduction and workflow efficiency
Enabling our workforce to focus on high-value tasks and deliver care more efficiently
Preventive care
Transforming disease screening and care management with centralized and human-automation hybrid approaches
Well-being
Taking care of our workforce and the communities we serve
Impact
We apply new care models, digital innovations, and behavioral and data science to create a profoundly better health care future. Our collaborations with clinicians, operations staff and leaders, and community partners over the past decade-plus have saved lives, made care more accessible, reduced costs for patients and the health system, improved the experience of patients and our workforce, and so much more.
Structure
CHTI comprises six coordinated Impact Cores – the Center for Insights to Outcomes, the Nudge Unit, Way to Health, the Population Health Lab, the Center for Health Justice, and the Core for Precision Resource Utilization. Use the links below to learn about the unique contributions of these teams.
Leveraging design thinking, technology, and data science to solve complex problems in health care
Designing and implementing scalable nudges to improve medical decision-making and patient outcomes
Providing technology infrastructure for sustainable behavior change interventions
Rapidly evaluating and implementing evidence-based interventions to improve health outcomes at scale
Enabling health through racial, economic, and environmental justice
Harnessing cutting-edge data science methodologies and interdisciplinary collaboration to drive transformative advancements in health care delivery
Principles and Values
Penn Medicine’s core values are excellence, integrity, diversity, professionalism, individual opportunity, teamwork and collaboration, and tradition. At CHTI, we also embrace the following innovation/transformation-focused principles.
Transformative impact
We will pursue measurable, human-centered, and data-backed innovations that drive scalable and sustainable transformation in care delivery, operations, and outcomes.
Agility and adaptability
We will remain responsive to evolving health care challenges by embracing change, iterating quickly, and scaling impactful solutions to meet current and future needs.
Evidence-based progress
We will commit to rigorous, evidence-based methods in identifying, testing, and implementing innovations that deliver meaningful value for patients, clinicians, and the health system.
People-centric design
We will place humans at the center of every solution, ensuring empathy, usability, and long-term adoption.
Bold leadership
We will challenge the status quo by fostering a culture of bold thinking, creative problem-solving, and courageous experimentation to advance health care transformation.