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Penn Med: Digital Innovation Award

Penn Medicine received the Enterprise Award for Digital Innovation from Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT) for the creation of Penn Life Gained, a first-of-its-kind mobile app for bariatric surgery patients that launched December 2017. The award is given to an organization that applies new or existing technology in an innovative way to solve a problem or advance goals.

Bariatric surgery patients are often asked to track steps and exercise, record caloric and water intake, monitor sleep time, and alter diet, in addition to managing their clinic appointments and evaluations while on the road to bariatric surgery, which can be overwhelming. Penn Life Gained, built using Apple CareKit, a software framework designed to help people actively manage their own medical conditions, will help collate all of the patients’ health information for them in one place.

Patients in the Bariatric Surgery Program who have an iPhone will be able to download the app via the App Store and log in using a unique code that they receive from the clinical team. Once fully enrolled, patients can sync information from any other app that they use. As a partner-app to Penn Life Gained, Penn Medicine and Medable, an app and analytics platform for healthcare, created a second clinician-facing app, which allows the care team to monitor the patients’ health data in real-time, by syncing the two applications. Penn Life Gained can easily monitor the patient’s pre- and post-surgery progress, help personalize clinic visits based on data collected from the app, assign “to-do’s” and manage personalized care plans, as well as spot areas of concern.

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