2021 was a big year for Way to Health – not only for our team and product but also for the army of amazing researchers and clinical care teams developing and managing interventions on our platform.

 

Impact at scale

W2H has experienced exponential growth in the number of patients and study participants that have engaged with our platform. Over half a million people interacted with the platform last year, pushing us to a total engagement of 1.4 million people.

The operations team stood up 51 new implementations last year – accounting for an average of one project launch per week! We also supported an additional 40 ongoing programs. Implementations span across research and clinical domains.

 

Pandemic response

COVID wasn’t going away, so neither were we! We continued to apply our expertise and experience in delivering high-impact pandemic response programs. For example, COVID Watch, a text messaging program that safely monitors patients with COVID-19 at home, reduced morbidity among enrolled patients by 68 percent. We continued delivering COVID test results to patients at Penn Medicine and expanded this work to include students and faculty at the university, as many returned to campus last year. Between the health system and the university, we communicated over 80,000 test results, and we launched a version of COVID Watch specifically for the university, known as COVID Navigator. W2H also supported outreach, registration, and follow-up for community vaccine clinics designed to address racial inequity in vaccine distribution. Over 8,000 vaccine doses have been administered to date, with 85 percent of vaccine recipients identifying as Black or Brown.

 

Product highlights

While our operations team was busy cranking out new and impactful remote monitoring programs, the engineering team elevated these efforts by making noteworthy platform enhancements. The team completed 93 unique user stories, including a complete rebuild of our embedded view within the electronic record, new device integrations with the Omron blood pressure cuff and TrueMotion, an app that promotes safe driving. Their work also included lots of ‘behind the curtain’ development to support and optimize programs at scale (remember the half of a million people that interacted with the platform last year?).

Interoperability was front and center in 2021. Outside of our device integrations, our engineers have now established and maintained over 13 custom integrations. This includes commercial vendors like Salesforce, as well as Omni and Upshot, two homegrown population management solutions developed at Penn Medicine. The team built and deployed 40 unique builds associated with these integrations. These builds automated patient enrollment, data processing, and pushing relevant data back into the electronic health record. The engineers and analysts tag-teamed efforts to deliver over 30 custom dashboards and reports leveraging our business intelligence tool, Lens.

 

Insights from research

Our research community shared powerful results for various remote engagement solutions, accounting for 12 newly published articles this year. Of note was a mega study set to increase flu vaccination rates. A simple tweak of wording accounted for an 11 percent increase. Health system campaigns leveraged this strategy in a variety of COVID-19 vaccine efforts (including a texting campaign W2H deployed), tapping into this newfound knowledge immediately.

 

Team news

Our close-knit team of analysts and engineers had a busy year, too! Neda Khan earned her master's degree in health care innovation and was promoted to Innovation Manager, leading all implementation efforts for the platform. Christianne Sevinc welcomed her second daughter June to the W2H child crew, bringing a total of 11 children (We are going to have to start running zone defense over here!). Sadie Friday joined the operations team while also pushing a multi-site R01 research trial to the finish line. Girl can hustle! Ling Tran joined the engineering team, boosting velocity and morale alike. The rest of the gang continued to deliver meaningful work, accounting for the many accomplishments above.

 

A look ahead

In some ways, 2021 was all about 2022. Our team is prepping for a strong year ahead, supporting health care operations and research through automation and innovation. We can’t give it all away so soon, but be on the lookout for analytics at your fingertips and natural language understanding baked into our core text algorithm offerings.

Here’s a summary PDF of the above.

 

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About the author

Christianne Sevinc is the product owner on the Way to Health team.