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September 2021 Month in Review
Each month, we round up news stories and publications about work happening across CHCI. Read the latest issue and subscribe to have the Month in Review sent directly to your inbox.
CHCI
Can Yelp reviews help hospitals target racism?
Researchers from the Center for Digital Health and Penn's National Clinician Scholars Program leveraged natural language processing to narrow a pool of more than 90,000 Yelp reviews down to 260 reviews of 190 hospitals in 33 states that specifically mentioned "racism."
The study, published in JAMA Network Open, demonstrates that it is feasible to identify acts of interpersonal racism in health care in online reviews. The authors argue that hospitals should leverage this outlet to better understand how consumers perceive and report racism.
This work was featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Creating agile technology to track COVID-19 risk
More than a year and a half and four million screenings later, experts from the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine continue to make PennOpen Pass more efficient and effective.
On the Penn Medicine News Blog, members of the team, including Krisda Chaiyachati, describe what it was like to "build and fix the plane while flying it" and shed light on plans for the application as the pandemic continues.
Penn Medicine News Blog
The pandemic's impact on statin prescriptions
In Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, Atsushi Mizuno, Sri Adusumalli, and others describe their process to evaluate statin prescribing rates for eligible Penn Medicine patients before and during the COVID-19 pandemic when care was being delivered in-person and via telemedicine.
The team found that statin prescription rates were the same or higher during telemedicine visits compared to in-person visits, indicating that hyperlipidemia management could be an ideal candidate for telemedical care delivery.
Circulation
Testing alternative pathways to hospitalization
The Acceleration Lab's PATH program has demonstrated that it can reduce patient time in the emergency department (ED), prevent inpatient hospital stays, and keep most patients from returning to the ED within 30 days.
Learn more about this program, how it's expanding thanks to a Clinical Care Innovation Grant from Independence Blue Cross, and why it's more important than ever amid the COVID-19 pandemic in this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Inquirer
How to connect communities to colorectal cancer screening
Experts from across Penn Medicine are working to raise colorectal cancer screening rates and increase follow-up care uptake to drive down death rates and reduce inequities.
Efforts include partnering with local talk radio stations to raise awareness, working with community leaders to distribute at-home testing kits, deploying navigators to help patients overcome barriers, and leveraging new communications channels and insights from behavioral economics.
Learn more about these interventions and what's moving the needle in this article from Penn Medicine.
Penn Medicine
