The days of door-to-door traveling salesmen are long over. For most of the last century, if you needed to buy something, you had to get up, get dressed, travel to a town or a mall or shopping center, and physically browse a store that had what you needed. But, eventually, and then quickly, shopping got much, much easier. Today with one-click "buy now" and saved payment information on an app, it's almost as though we've come full-circle to the traveling salesman, but better: The same-day delivery driver can drop off the exact thing you need, right when you need it—with a lot more options than could ever fit in a suitcase.
Why is it so much easier to buy light bulbs and cases of soda than it is to take care of your health? And what would it take to make the latter (almost) equally as easy?
The answer to the first question, in part, is that health care is incredibly complex, and it's much harder work to make health care easy. Behind the scenes at Penn Medicine, there are countless efforts underway to do this hard work, and to lead the industry in doing so. It's a goal stated directly in our strategic plan: Simplify care delivery and place it within reach.
Until we get there, we're sharing stories about our work in progress.
Across programs that once represented islands of innovation to make care easier, teams are beginning to build bridges to shape connected landscapes. There are programs deeply integrated with home care to help patients with serious diseases get advanced care in a more convenient setting than a hospital. A specialized clinic now offers cancer patients 24/7 service if they experience side effects or symptom flare-ups that need prompt medical attention. And Penn Medicine researchers are testing out strategies that intentionally tackle the fact that getting care is often a time suck. (The technical term is "time toxicity.")
Other efforts are even farther behind the scenes. When you really need a hospital bed, how do you know one will be available for you? Demand is higher than ever, even as the aging population gets sicker, and many smaller hospitals are closing under financial pressures, straining capacity across the industry. Enter a hive of cubicles at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and you'll see the teams helping patients overcome this challenge. Here, an integrated capacity management team works side-by-side with the health system's transfer center and PennSTAR medical transport dispatch. They coordinate with everyone involved in preparing to care for a patient, from physicians to environmental services teams, with the ultimate goal of admitting all the patients who need Penn Medicine care in a hospital, to the right place, at the right time. That's especially important for patients with severe or time-critical illnesses who need advanced care that few other health care organizations can provide.
There are times, too, when making care easy means meeting people where they are in the community. This compassionate drive to meet patients where they are has brought nurses from Lancaster General Health to rural community firehouses to offer free vaccinations for children, for over 30 years. And the same passion for equal access to care compels current Perelman School of Medicine students to form relationships with people experiencing homelessness right on the edge of campus, in hopes that trust will lead to better health.
None of this work is easy, but the motivation to do it is abundant: Across all corners of Penn Medicine, students, doctors, nurses, therapists, transporters, and other staff of all stripes work so hard to make care easy because it's the right thing to do.
The days of the family physician who makes house calls may be equally as much an artifact of history as a traveling salesman. But these stories of Penn Medicine's commitment provide a clearer picture the full-circle vision that could make care much easier again— with a lot more to offer than could fit in a traditional doctor's bag.
