A Global Pandemic Turned Everything Upside Down. What Has Penn Medicine’s Innovation Team Learned From That?

 Originally Published on - https://novafaces.com/

It’s from the most harrowing crises that the greatest lessons are often learned.

Plagues in the Middle Ages prompted the first organized instances of quarantining to control international disease spread. A yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia following the American Revolution prompted a law that first established hospitals in port cities to keep sailors fit for service, which then evolved into the nation’s Public Health Service. And amid the magnitude of catastrophic head and facial injuries among combatants in the First World War, the field of plastic surgery emerged to restore form and function to the wounded’s bodies.

All of those responses arose directly from emergencies affecting certain times but have had immeasurable impacts in the years forward. To many in health care — including those in Penn Medicine’s Center for Health Care Innovation — the COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis from which we can find our next great learning opportunity.

Charged with fixing some of the biggest problems in health care, members of the Center for Health Care Innovation have been intimately involved in Penn Medicine’s efforts to combat COVID-19. Their work, in partnership with many teams across the health system, has ranged from developing drive-through testing sites and revamped emergency room entrances to address suddenly heightened infection control at the start of the pandemic to facilitating equitable vaccine roll-out efforts in communities that have been historically underserved by health care.

Read full article: https://novafaces.com/news/a-global-pandemic-turned-everything-upside-down-what-has-penn-medicines-innovation-team-learned-from-that/