At Way to Health (W2H), our team continues to bring scalable care delivery solutions and clinical research studies to life, in many cases expanding patient reach while reducing staff burden. In 2024, we expanded our portfolio as well as our team and rolled out plenty of product enhancements. Though far from comprehensive, this recap offers a window into who we are and the work we do.

The team

As anyone in the software industry knows, software is ultimately about the people working on it. W2H has a great culture – almost like a startup within the broader Penn Medicine umbrella. We’re a growing team of 14 now (compared to 12 last year). This growth would not be possible without the amazing outcomes we’ve been able to accomplish over the past several years.

 

Our portfolio continues to grow

In 2023, the W2H team launched 49 new clinical and research implementations and supported 65 existing programs at Penn Medicine and other health systems – around 20 percent more programs than we launched and supported in 2022. In 2024, we sustained this remarkable velocity even while rolling out larger-scale programs. In the last year, we launched 47 programs, and we currently support 223 clinical and research programs.

Over the lifetime of our platform, Way to Health–powered programs have led to 120 peer-reviewed publications (not a comprehensive list), and more are in the pipeline. We are privileged to have been part of close to 2 million individuals’ lives, and our numbers are growing quickly – we added more than 236,000 individuals in 2024 (a 13 percent increase).

Way to Health has managed a giant portfolio – 428 projects to date. Our team not only develops the software that makes these programs possible, and implement the programs, we also help clinicians and researchers understand the dos and don’ts and help with design, content, communication frequency, and much more, given our extensive experience.

 

Program highlights

We have a large portfolio of projects that we help design, build, test, iterate on, and support. Research programs run anywhere from six months to six years, and supporting them requires skill and vigilance. For example, rolling out product features could impact existing programs, so careful testing and close collaboration with the study teams are needed to make sure the collected data are unaffected. We continually evaluate each of our clinical programs to ensure they are generating ongoing value and engagement among clinicians and patients. To optimize our resources and be mindful of our participants’ time, we curate our portfolio and prioritize supporting high-value programs.

Many of our flagship programs continue to scale and deliver value. Refill Express, which automates and facilitates prescription refilling of specialty medications, is the standard practice at all pharmacy locations for Penn and has close to 11,000 patients enrolled and a 91 net promoter score. Refill Express has reduced manual effort from pharmacy staff by more than half while increasing quality and timeliness of follow-up. Our success allowed us to rapidly roll out a version of the program specifically tailored to GLP-1 medications, which now has close to 7,000 patients enrolled. Kudos to Michael Josephs, Ben Rosenbach, and Jake Van Osten from W2H and the pharmacy team led by Laura Hallisey and Chris Whritenour on this effort.

Heart Safe Motherhood, a remote monitoring intervention for postpartum hypertension, continues to save lives and reduce cost of care while reducing adverse patient outcomes even after the program is completed. The program is in use at six institutions across the country – an impressive figure considering that expansion is based on reputation and word-of-mouth alone.

Coloprep, a colonoscopy navigator program, has been implemented at sites across the health system. Coloprep was linked to a six percent increase in show rate among 20,000 patients enrolled with full bi-directional texting and write-backs into Epic. Lisa Scottoline (a New York Times best-selling author) wrote a blog post about how much she enjoyed the text exchange from the bot, which she affectionately named “BumBot.” 

Notable clinical programs include:

DOTbot: Penn Medicine’s Primary Care practices manage a lot of patients. For about 60 percent of patients with diabetes, there are no recorded A1c labs in the past year. These patients are regularly contacted to make sure they get their labs done and titrate their medications. Before, this was a manual effort requiring phone calls from population health coordinators and associates. With the bi-directional texting program DOTbot, we saw a 45 percent response rate (44 percent increase vs. phone outreach), 11 percent lab completion (18 percent increase), 18 percent office visit completion (166 percent increase) and, importantly, just about 4 hours per week of manual effort (90 percent reduction). The program has been mostly automated now and should reduce the manual effort required even further. Kudos to Sadie Friday, Skip Coon and Kyle McGrogan from W2H and the Primary Care team (Dr. Marguerite Balasta, Dr. Corie Rhodes, Gaibriel De Guzman, and others) for driving this project.

Together Care: This project started in the gynecologic oncology (GynOnc) space. The aim was to create a texting algorithm that will support post-operative calls with thesepatients: Enabling texting communication that would filter the acuity would allow our overburdened nursing staff to triage the patients in a timelier way while still connecting with all the patients post-operatively. The results are pretty impressive (see figure), which are described in a NEJM Catalyst paper along with more information around the process we undertook to design this program. With the GynOnc version deployed, we are now beginning to scale this program across other surgical subspecialties. Kudos to Sadie Friday from W2H and Nick Bailey and Lisa Mills from the maternal and fetal medicine and GynOnc divisions for making this project possible.

Peri-Op Arrival Times: Typically, the arrival time for a procedure is decided only a couple of days in advance of the procedure because of logistical constraints such as medication stoppage or uptake, last-minute challenges, and room availability. Previous, arrival time notification was a fully manual process involving phone calls, which is fraught with challenges. We automated the process via text and only escalated cases to clinical staff when patients needed attention or did not confirm their appointment. This intervention reduced staff effort by half, and our data suggest an absolute decrease of 1 percent in no-shows or same-day cancellations. This project is now being rolled out across multiple sites at Penn. Kudos to Sarah Milinski from W2H, Matt Van Der Tuyn and Cody Chapman from the Center for Insights to Outcomes, and the Peri-Op team (Sunilka Thompson, Anna Carillo, and their amazing team) for driving this project.

Notable research programs include:

PCORI Opioid Use Disorder - Care Connect: While buprenorphine is a safe and effective medicine that patients can take at home to treat opioid use disorder, the challenge is to get patients on that treatment and to ensure they don’t have any barriers in getting the medication. This multi-site research grant is trying to use the emergency department (ED) as a gateway to get individuals enrolled in a program to get the help they need as efficiently as possible. We know ED physicians are very busy, and so we are integrating with instances of Epic (see subsequent section re: listing on Epic Vendor Services) to simplify enrollment and ongoing communication. Thanks to Sadie Friday and Aaron Leitner from W2H and Dr. Kit Delgado, Neda Khan, and others from the Nudge Unit to make this happen.

American Heart Association – Health Care by Food initiative: We are proud to be part of several research programs using behavioral science to engage with and promote healthier eating habits with the goal of preventing, and reducing the impact of, chronic diseases. There are multiple W2H programs that have been built and deployed, and results will be forthcoming. The effort, an ongoing collaboration with private and public entities, is led by Dr. Kevin Volpp and multiple other researchers. Kudos to Adriana Discher and Sadie Friday for helping implement these programs quickly.

PCORI RADCOMP: This program is an existing, PCORI-funded, pragmatic cancer trial of 1,200 patients across 24 sites exploring whether proton therapy vs. intensity-modulated radiation therapy can reduce major cardiovascular events over 10 years post-treatment. Patients will transition from in-person follow-up check-ins at their trial site to twice-annual, automated check-ins via SMS, IVR, and email to learn about any adverse events or acute care needs. If patients have any adverse events or acute care events, a remote and centralized call center team will follow up to learn more and document for the trial. This is an interesting project as it also called for integrations with Salesforce as a central call center tool. Kudos to Michael Josephs and Kyle McGrogan from W2H and Dr. Justin Bekelman, Hien Lu, and Amanda Driscoll from the research team on making all that happen.
 

Product highlights

The SHAPE UP methodology has been working well for us (shout out to the folks at Basecamp). The team was able to crank out 320 development tickets, including 91 core feature tickets (roughly 1.5 a week), address associated bugs (see our earlier note about research and clinical programs being complicated), and handle one-off requests thanks to the able leadership of our engineering head, Kyle McGrogan. 

The team made some big changes to the platform, including: 

• a participant upload feature to facilitate adding, updating, and re-enrolling participant records
• improved ways to view, add, and edit data for participants
• clearer event logic documentation to help users understand why a particular message or action occurred for a participant, and 
• ongoing work to move data flows to Databricks, an analytics platform that has become the Penn Medicine standard.

Additionally, Way to Health is listed on Epic’s Vendor Services so that any Epic user can leverage the programs that we have shown to work and that are backed by rigorous academic evidence. We are live with a couple of instances at Alameda Health in Oakland, California, and with Cooper Health in New Jersey. We have learned that this process is neither simple nor short, mainly because of information services (IS) constraints at the institutions. Kudos to Aaron Leitner from W2H and Neda Khan and others from the Nudge Unit for driving this challenging process to completion.

Way to Health was also designated as Penn Medicine’s de facto patient-facing communications platform for complex clinical communications – in addition to being one of the four preferred patient communications platforms – by Project Ascend, the health system’s digital customer service transformation program. Way to Health leadership also sits on the committee that reviews all patient communication requests. Of the more than 70 requests reviewed so far, more than a quarter have been allocated to Way to Health.

Along with developing and scaling programs, we provide maintenance support for a host of programs. In this arena, our operations and engineering team were amazing as usual, addressing 855 support tickets in 2024 (an increase of 32 percent), averaging about 17 tickets resolved each week. Most tickets were requests for help with using specific features or addressing configuration changes.

 

W2H metrics

We’re frequently asked about the work that we do and how we measure ourselves. Last year, we set up a W2H dashboard to make our data publicly available. We always welcome feedback and ways to improve our reporting. If you do have comments or suggestions, please email us.

 

Acknowledgments

It’s been a challenging yet very rewarding year. We are grateful for all the researchers, clinicians, project managers, research coordinators, IS/IT personnel, and others whom we work with at Penn and at other institutions. Thank you for making 2024 another great year for us.

 

---

 

About the author

Mohan Balachandran is the Executive Director at Way to Health.