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, reaching total engagement to 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. COVID Watch, a text messaging program that safely monitors patients with COVID-19 at home, was shown to reduce morbidity among enrolled patients by 68%. 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’ve communicated over 80,000 test results. 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. 85% of vaccine recipients at these clinics were Black or Brown, and over 8000 vaccine doses have been administered to date.
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 which 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 of 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 a variety of 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% 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 completed her Masters 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 look out for analytics at your fingertips, and natural language understanding baked into our core text algorithm offerings.
Here’s a summary PDF of the above.
