At the Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation (CHTI), our mission is to catalyze change across Penn Medicine to advance health and reimagine health care delivery for dramatically better outcomes. Since our founding in 2012, we have partnered with health system leaders and frontline teams to solve pressing challenges and pursue emerging opportunities by designing, validating, and implementing key improvements to care.
CHTI is led by Raina Merchant, chief transformation officer, and Kathleen Lee, associate chief transformation officer at Penn Medicine. Together with a senior leadership team, they oversee a portfolio that turns strategic priorities into practical, scalable improvements in how care is delivered and experienced.
Our work interweaves innovation and transformation functions, where innovation is about creating and testing new solutions and transformation is about embedding those innovations into the fabric of our health system. At CHTI, innovation is not an upstream activity handed off for later execution. Rather, it is designed from the outset to move into implementation and scale, enabling promising ideas to reshape care through lasting change that reaches across settings.
CHTI’s purpose and direction are anchored in Penn Medicine’s strategic vision, with a focus on two pillars:
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Simplify care delivery and place it within reach: We partner with leaders and care teams to reduce friction, redesign care pathways, and expand access, making care easier to deliver, easier to navigate, and more consistently high-quality across settings.
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Make breathtaking discoveries and put them to work: We translate high-potential, evidence-based innovations – whether scientific, clinical, operational, digital, or data driven – into real-world models, workflows, and platforms that can be implemented and sustained.
We engage with teams and executives across the enterprise, with our depth of involvement – ranging from consultation to project co-ownership – tailored to each initiative. The resulting solutions take many shapes, including clinical and operating models, capability-enhancing tools, and integrated digital platforms.
How We Work
Enterprise divisions
CHTI’s transformation portfolio – a core set of programs and platforms focused on enterprise transformation – are governed by our two primary divisions.
Division of Emerging Care Delivery
Led by Christina O’Malley, this division oversees programs that activate new care paradigms. The division reimagines where and how care is delivered, expanding beyond traditional sites to drive future growth, access, and system transformation.
Division of Care Delivery Augmentation
Led by Lauren Hahn and Eugene Gitelman, this division oversees white-space solutions that strengthen care delivery through systems thinking, technology, and a human-centered, behaviorally informed approach. The division reduces burden, closes operational gaps, and elevates human workflows through redesign, simplification, and, when appropriate, technology enablement.
Visit our Portfolio page to learn more about the work in each of these divisions.
Centers of Expertise
CHTI is also home to five Centers of Expertise that generate knowledge and drive change in priority domains through specialized capabilities. The Centers of Expertise inform and advance CHTI’s Transformation portfolio across the project lifecycle through domain expertise, methodological rigor, and applied learning. In tandem, these centers lead independent research-driven portfolios, exploring frontiers in health and furthering the academic mission of Penn Medicine.
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The Nudge Unit, led by M. Kit Delgado, designs and implements scalable nudges to improve medical decision-making and patient outcomes.
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Way to Health, led by Mohan Balachandran, provides technology infrastructure for sustainable behavior change interventions.
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The Population Health Lab, led by Shivan Mehta, rapidly evaluates and implements evidence-based interventions to improve health outcomes at scale.
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The Center for Health Justice, led by Eugenia South, seeks to enable health through racial, economic, and environmental justice for Black, Brown, and all people and neighborhoods harmed by structural inequity.
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The Center for Precision Resource Utilization, led by Rachel Kelz, harnesses cutting-edge data science methodologies and interdisciplinary collaboration to drive transformative advancements in health care delivery.
Use the links below to learn more about each Center of Expertise.
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