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Environmental Award: Dr. Block
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On October 24, the Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy presented Dr. Timothy Block of the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania with the 2013 Advocate of the Watershed Environmental Award, recognizing outstanding contributions to the local environment. The Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy presents annual awards to those individuals who participate in community efforts to protect and improve the local environment surrounding the Perkiomen Creek Watershed.
The Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy’s mission is to serve all who live, work and play within the Perkiomen Creek Watershed by conserving and protecting the land and water resources of its 362 square miles. Founded in 1964, today the Conservancy helps ensure quality drinking water for hundreds of local communities including Philadelphia. |
RWJF Funding: Dr. Brooks Carthon
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Dr. J. Margo Brooks Carthon, assistant professor of nursing, has been awarded $350,000 in funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to study “Nursing and patient perspectives of hospital readmission disparities.”
Dr. Brooks Carthon's research will examine how nursing interventions, such as discharge planning and coordination of care, influence repeat hospitalizations among older minority patients. The study will employ a mixed model approach and will elicit viewpoints of older minority patients through focus group interviews and survey responses of nurses. |
'Bright Idea' in Education: Mr. Daughtridge
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A medical student in the Perelman School of Medicine is among the winners of the first ever Teaching Value and Choosing Wisely competition held by the Costs of Care and the ABIM Foundation for innovative projects that promote high-value care by reducing waste and overuse in health care.
Awarded in the “Bright Idea” category, second year medical student Giffin Daughtridge, along with his faculty advisor, Richard P. Shannon, former chair of the department of medicine of the University of Pennsylvania Health System who is now at the University of Virginia, designed an advanced elective course to help improve cost consciousness and decision making for fourth year medical students and residents. The course includes a syllabus of didactic lectures combined with a value analysis project that requires calculation of the cost of an ideal care plan for a real patient and comparing this to the patient’s true costs of care.
This course will initially be offered in January 2014, and once it has been piloted, it will be integrated into the Perelman School of Medicine’s curriculum. The classes and value analysis project will be replicable at any medical school that has an affiliated hospital. |
Namesake Prize for Research:Dr. Delivoria-Papadopoulos
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In honor of Dr. Maria Delivoria-Papadopoulos, professor emeritus of pediatrics and physiology in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Children’s Center NICN, established as of November 6, 2013 the Maria Delivoria-Papadopoulos Prize for Research in Neonatal Neuroscience in recognition of her lifetime of service she has provided to students of neonatal medicine.
The prize will be awarded to a fellow of Neonatal Perinatal Medicine that has accomplished an outstanding research project in neuroscience.
Dr. Delivoria has expanded the science of neonatology and continues to make significant and lasting contributions to the health of the world’s children. She is revered as an outstanding leader in academic pediatrics and is perhaps best known for performing the world’s first successful ventilation treatment for premature infants in North America. |
Maria Delivoria-Papadopoulos |
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Namesake Scholarship: Ms. Kinney
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A new scholarship for the study of health care management has been named in honor of June Kinney, the long-time associate director of the health care management department in Wharton and a senior fellow of Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
Organized by the Wharton Health Care Management Alumni Association (WHCMAA), the June Kinney/WHCMAA scholarship fund was officially launched at the organization’s annual conference last month.
Ms. Kinney, who joined the Wharton School in 1981, is credited with fostering one of the largest and most respected health care management programs in the country.
Whereas the Kissick Scholarship is designed for students who are already enrolled in Wharton, the new Kinney Scholarship will be different in that it is aimed at students who haven’t yet made their final decision about which school to attend. |
Emerging Leaders in Science and Society Fellows
Four University of Pennsylvania graduate students have been named to the inaugural class of Emerging Leaders in Science and Society Fellows. ELISS is sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
They are among 16 from four founding partner institutions: Penn, Stanford University, the University of Washington and Purdue University.
The Penn students, are all PhD candidates, and their fields are:
Ben Chrisinger, city and regional planning, School of Design.
Johannes Eichstaedt, psychology, School of Arts and Sciences.
Ruth Masterson Creber, nursing science, School of Nursing.
Maddie Stone, earth and environmental science, School of Arts and Sciences.
The new AAAS multi-campus, national initiative is a one-year competitive program designed to complement graduate and professional student studies by producing leaders to help the nation understand and address issues related to community, the economy, health, energy and the environment.
The Fellows will receive financial assistance, career development and networking opportunities to assist them in mounting interdisciplinary and professional development programs for students at their institutions.
The pilot class of 16 fellows will begin in January. |
Penn Ranked #1 in Safety
The University of Pennsylvania ranked #1 in safety and security in the higher education sector, according to Security magazine’s “Security 500” list. This is the seventh consecutive year that Penn has taken the magazine’s top honors in their respective vertical market.
The Security 500 Benchmarking Survey tracked 17 vertical markets and collected unique data where appropriate (such as patients in health care) and applied this data to key metrics. The key metrics collected this year include: Security Spending/Person, Security Spending/Revenue, Security Officers/Employee and Security Officers/Facility. The survey received its information from data supplied directly by national universities and colleges, as well as data obtained through public resources and records.
Security magazine states that the “purpose of the Security 500 is to create a reliable database to measure your organization versus others and create a benchmarking program among security organizations. The results will enable you to answer the question, ‘Where Do I Stand?’ as a basis of an ongoing peer review process.”
“It is no surprise that Penn has a consistently top notch program,” said Mark McCourt of Security magazine. “They are successful, in large part, because [they] understand the credibility, relationship and language issues in an executive setting. He continued, “the team is well trained and executes in a manner that enhances Penn’s brand while ably managing risk and resilience issues.”
“The ongoing support of our President Amy Gutmann, Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli, Provost Vince Price, and the dedication of the women and men of the Division of Public Safety and Penn Medicine Security keep us at the top of our field,” said Maureen S. Rush, Vice President for Public Safety.
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Grand Challenges Explorations Grant for Penn Veterinary Medicine
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The University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) announced that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Robert M. Greenberg, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, “Helminth ABC transporters as targets for combination therapy.”
Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Dr. Greenberg’s project is one of more than 80 Grand Challenges Explorations Round 11 grants announced recently by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
To receive funding, Dr. Greenberg and other Grand Challenges Explorations Round 11 winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of five critical global heath and development topic areas that included development of the next generation condom, agriculture development and neglected tropical diseases.
Parasitic worms such as schistosomes and filarial and soil-transmitted nematodes infect as many as a billion people worldwide and have devastating effects on human health and economic development. Dr. Greenberg and Dr. Bernadette Ardelli of Brandon University in Manitoba will explore ways to enhance the effectiveness of drugs against these infections. They will test whether the potency of current drugs can be enhanced by co-administration of compounds that block protective mechanisms the worms use to transport the drugs out of cells and tissues. This approach could potentially increase drug effectiveness and prevent the emergence of drug resistance.
Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 850 people in more than 50 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of $100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million. |
Recognizing Penn as a Leader in Green Purchasing
Office Depot, a global provider of office supplies and services, announced the University of Pennsylvania as an award winner for leadership in a specific aspect of green purchasing—green spending analysis. For the past seven years, Office Depot has recognized a small group of contract customers who proactively seek out products with environmental attributes and ecolabels. For 2013, the University of Pennsylvania was one of 28 organizations selected out of 17,000 customers.
Office Depot’s Special Recognition Awards are based on specific aspects of a customer’s purchasing program or leadership in greening certain product categories. The award was presented at the GreenBuild Conference & Expo on November 22 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Penn Purchasing provides efficient and effective buying methods, purchasing policies and procedures and customer support for Penn faculty and staff. The department also manages the University’s economic inclusion program, Green Purchasing initiatives and establishes strategic supplier relationships to provide lowest “total cost” products and services.
For more information, visit www.purchasing.upenn.edu |
Excellence in Economic Development: Penn Medicine
Penn Medicine was recognized with two Gold Excellence awards by the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) for its efforts to create positive change in the community. Penn Medicine was honored for its work redeveloping Philadelphia’s former Civic Center into a matrix of world-class medical research and treatment centers. The award included the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), who owned the land, as well as the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which has also built in the area.
The two honors, in the categories of Public-Private Partnerships for communities with populations greater than 500,000, and Partnerships with Educational Institutions for communities with populations greater than 500,000, were presented at an awards ceremony earlier this month at the IEDC Annual Conference in Philadelphia. The non-profit IEDC is a membership organization serving economic developers. Its Excellence in Economic Development Awards recognize the world’s best economic development programs and partnerships, marketing materials and the year’s most influential leaders.
The former Civic Center site now houses Penn Medicine’s Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, the Smilow Center for Translational Research and the Roberts Proton Therapy Center, all of which have taken shape since 2005. The area is also the site of the Colket Translational Research Building and the Buerger Center for Advanced Pediatric Care, slated to open in 2015.
Together Penn Medicine and CHOP invested more than $2 billion in its facilities on the site and construction on another one million square feet of space is expected to finish by 2015. |
2013 HAP Achievement Award for Pennsylvania Hospital
Pennsylvania Hospital (PAH) of Penn Medicine was named a winner of The Hospital and Health System Association of Pennsylvania’s (HAP) 2013 Achievement Award.
PAH was one of 19 hospitals recognized for innovative programs addressing critical and timely issues concerning: patient satisfaction, workforce issues, public health and education, influenza, falls, infection prevention, mortality reduction, oxygen therapy and disaster preparedness. Chosen from 131 hospital programs submitted from across the state, entries were evaluated by a 15-judge panel representing the public and private sectors and included leadership from the National Patient Safety Foundation, The Joint Commission and The Patient Safety Authority.
On November 4, HAP President Andy Carter visited PAH to personally present the award to Maria Vacca, infection prevention specialist, Diane Angelos, clinical nurse education specialist and fellow winning team members for their Patient Safety entry, Prevention of Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection in a Neurological ICU Using a Proactive Approach to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Bundle.
“This award recognition confirms the commitment of our staff to quality and continuous improvement in the delivery of health care,” said Dr. Daniel M. Feinberg, chief medical officer of PAH. “It is a tremendous honor for Maria and Diane and the whole team. What they accomplished with this initiative is truly impressive.”
“Our initiative began over a year ago when it was identified that the Neurological Intensive Care Unit (NICU) had a significant increase in their Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI),” said Ms. Vacca. “Our idea was to stop reacting to infections after they occurred by taking a proactive approach to CAUTI prevention.”
In July of 2012, Ms. Vacca and her team began implementing weekly rounds on each patient in the NICU. They assessed specific criteria established by the Centers for Disease Control to prevent CAUTI. They then developed and refined a rounding tool for data collection and analysis to assist with weekly rounds. Findings were communicated via email to the health care team in real time and unit nurses were also educated in real time as issues were identified and resolved. The team utilized the rounding tool as a guide to assess patients, educate their peers and collaborate with physicians and advanced practice providers to expedite the catheter removal process.
Over a nine month period from when the initiative began, the NICU went from an average CAUTI rate of nine percent per 1,000 patient days—to zero—with an estimated direct cost savings of $40,000. The process, which has been successfully adopted by other clinical units at PAH, continues to evolve as the staff becomes more engaged in maintaining patient safety by preventing CAUTIs.
“We look forward to continue seeing positive results in our NICU and all Critical Care Units of the hospital where the rounding process has been adopted,” said Ms. Vacca.
Additional team members involved in the award winning initiative are: Christopher Huot, nurse manager, Critical Care; Dr. Paul Kinniry, medical director, Medical Intensive Care Unit; Danielle C. Reynolds, Quality and Performance Improvement coordinator; Debra Runyan, director of infection prevention; and the registered nurses of the PAH Neurological Intensive Care Unit. |
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