Kathryn H. Bowles, the van Ameringen Chair in Nursing Excellence and a professor in Penn Nursing’s department of biobehavioral health sciences, will receive the Claire M. Fagin Distinguished Researcher Award. The award is given to a Penn Nursing faculty member or a graduate from the school’s doctoral program who has made a distinguished contribution to nursing scholarship.

Dr. Bowles’s research has focused on the use of information technology and health informatics to improve health care for at-risk older adults and support health-care providers’ efforts to improve planning and provide transitional care following hospital discharge, thereby reducing hospital readmissions. Her ongoing studies include the development of decision support tools to determine the best site of care for those needing post-discharge services; telehealth technology applications; the effect of home care and post-acute referrals on patient outcomes; and evaluation of electronic health records.

Dr. Bowles discovered a unique set of high-risk factors that determined which older patients were most likely to need continued skilled care after discharge. She and her team developed and validated a decision-support methodology that identified patients who need post-acute care. Through RightCare Solutions, which she co-founded in 2012, she and her team incorporated the Discharge Decision Support System (D2S2) into a software product that helps hospitals assess patients for post-acute care needs, optimizes workflow and ultimately lowers the number of readmissions. In 2015, naviHealth acquired RightCare Solutions.

Dr. Bowles will deliver her lecture “From Inquiry to Innovation: How a Clinical Question Became a Business Opportunity”on October 25, 3-5 p.m. at Fagin Hall. For more information or to RSVP visit https://tinyurl.com/y82xfnha