4 mins

2021 was a big year for Way to Health - not only for our team and product, but for the army of amazing researchers and clinical care teams that develop and manage interventions on our platform.

8 mins

My most recent fun ("fun") technical challenge: at the intersection of application behavior, network behavior, OS behavior, and far more TCP details than I normally deal with as an application developer.

8 mins

We recently introduced a new component - or rather set of components - to our infrastructure to improve our ability to monitor the operations of Way to Health. Prometheus and Grafana give us clear visual metrics for how things are working under the hood.

5 mins

This is part 6 of the series on Way to Health's involvement in helping address the pandemic. This post focuses on the design and launch of the COVID SAFE project. As the Penn health system and the University were looking at re-opening, the one concern was ongoing testing (this was before there was a vaccine in the picture). It was also felt that surveillance testing is critical in getting visibility into and managing the spread of the disease. This post outlines the COVID SAFE project which did this at scale using Saliva based testing methods and Way to Health.

4 mins

This is part 5 of a series on Way to Health's involvement in helping address the COVID-19 pandemic. This post focuses on the design and launch of the COVID Pulse project. This project addressed the Emergency Department (ED) need to be able to discharge patients with suspected COVID but not requiring immediate admission. The goal was to give these patients a pulse oximeter and remind them to send in their SpO2 readings on a regular basis. Way to Health would process these and based on the clinical algorithm escalate the patient as needed.

3 mins

This is part 4 of a series on Way to Health's involvement in helping address the pandemic. This post focuses on the design and launch of Flu Mega Study project. The intent of this project (which was planned far before the pandemic hit us all) was to try and figure out ways to incent people to get the flu vaccine. That, in itself is a worthwhile thing but the additional benefit is perhaps informing ways by which we can increase COVID vaccine uptake. The results have been staggering with just the choice of words increasing uptake by up to 11%.

6 mins

This is part 3 of a series on Way to Health's involvement in helping address the COVID-19 pandemic. This post focuses on the design and launch of the COVID Automated Results Reporting project. The intent behind this effort was to try and eliminate the manual effort around test result communication (especially when negative). While this was initially focused on patients, the effort quickly expanded to employees and most recently, students, faculty and staff here at Penn.

6 mins

This is part 2 of a series on Way to Health's involvement in helping address the pandemic. This post focuses on the design and launch of the Community Vaccine Clinics project. Black Americans are at a greater risk of contracting COVID-19 and twice as likely to be hospitalized. They are also under-vaccinated compared to other groups. There was an intentional effort at Penn Medicine to set up community vaccination clinics in partnership with local community and faith based organizations to try and vaccinate this vulnerable population. Led by Dr. Kathleen Lee and supported on the backend by Way to Health, the effort has so-far managed to vaccinate 3000+ individuals over three 1 day clinics. The aggregate NPS across all three clinics is 94!

5 mins

The COVID pandemic has impacted us all in various ways. This is part 1 of a series on Way to Health's involvement in helping address the pandemic. To date, Way to Health has enabled over 10 COVID related projects which were all set up within days to ensure patient quality of care while optimizing resource investments. This post focuses on the design and launch of the COVID Watch project.

6 mins

COVID has impacted us all. Working remotely has been a challenge. This is set of conversations with implementation, engineering and management to gain some insights into their work during these challenging times.

5 mins

From ideation through implementation, the Way to Health team has a lot of experience running connected health programs and research trials. Hear from the people behind the curtain about the best ways to deploy effective programs at scale.

2 mins

Way to Health has been used to test the effectiveness of patient financial incentives in improving outcomes in a variety of health contexts. Now, many of the functions deployed in those studies, including text messaging, will be used by researchers for PENN’s National Institute of Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness (ALACRITY) Center. Read on to understand how texting and other functions of Way to Health will be deployed in research among patients newly diagnosed with depression.

5 mins

Behavioral economics is a somewhat recent field of study. Its impact is increasingly felt in multiple domains. This article is an attempt to provide a brief overview of behavioral economics and compare it with "traditional" economics. Some core concepts are introduced. Our next article will focus more on each of these concepts with examples from health care.

3 mins

Over the course of the last several years, "patient engagement" has mushroomed into a lead topic for speakers, conferences, trade shows, pitch decks, analyst reports and countless headlines (now including this one). The trouble is, there is still no clear path forward to applying learnings at scale.

3 mins

It's been a long time coming. A lot of you might be discovering us for the first time. So let's take a few minutes to give you a flavor of who we are and what we do.