“We’re All Learning”: Q&A with Anna Schoenbaum, VP of Applications & Digital Health, Penn Medicine

Being an early adopter — or, at least, an organization on the cutting edge — requires a great deal of investment, but not just from a financial perspective. In fact, upfront costs are only part of the picture, said Anna Schoenbaum, VP of Applications and Digital Health at Penn Medicine.

“You want to make sure [solution installations] are well-resourced with the right stakeholders. Additionally, it also important to understand the support model, the sustainability of the solution and the optimization process,” she said during a recent interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor at healthsystemCIO. Any solution needs to meet the needs of patients and providers, and incorporate into the workflow, or else it doesn’t stand much of a chance.

During the discussion, Schoenbaum talked about how Penn Medicine is working toward its vision to “be part of a changing world” through initiatives focused on patient care and clinical efficiency and wellness.

Schoenbaum, who received the HIMSS-ANI Nursing Informatics Changemaker Award in 2023, also shared insights on the critical role of feedback loops in driving adoption; why strong governance and engagement must be part of an organization’s DNA; her team’s goals when it comes to leveraging ChatGPT; and her passion for informatics.

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Bold Statements

If a virtual nurse can come in and provide discharge instructions and training, that can help alleviate some of the workload on the bedside nurse. It can also provide a one-on-one concentration to the patient and make sure they really understand instructions … when patients are educated regarding their care, it can lead to better outcomes.

We always want to understand the purpose statement of the problem we’re trying to solve and where we want to go, and then we go through our governance group. That’s part of our DNA. We have really strong governance and strong engagement.

You need to listen and develop relationships where people can knock on your door, and you need to do some observation.

We’re all learning; we’re learning from our colleagues as well as our experts within the organization on how to shape that. We’re at the very beginning of the journey.

We’re excited to be on this journey to help our clinicians and to help our patients. And we do it in a very thoughtful and meaningful way so that we’re able to find the right solutions for the problems we’re trying to solve.

Q&A; with Anna Schoenbaum, VP of Applications & Digital Health, Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Health System

Gamble:  Hi Anna, thank you so much for joining us. Let’s start with a high-level overview of Penn Medicine, and then we’ll get into your role.

Schoenbaum:  Wonderful. Thanks so much for having me. Just a little bit about us; Penn Medicine is a six-hospital system providing care throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We have 49,000 employees. We have 3,600 inpatient beds on the acute care side, and we have around 6.9 million ambulatory visits per year. Our home health program is also very large. We have an average daily census of 4,000 which equates to 716,700 annual visits.

We’re an organization of many firsts. We have the nation’s first hospital, which was founded in 1751, and we have the first medical school in the United States, which dates back to 1765.

In addition to that, we recently had two physicians named winners of th...