Announcing Clifton Faculty Wellness Awards


January 27, 2020

To:PSOM Faculty ​ ​

From:J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD
Lisa Bellini, MD


We are pleased to announce the inaugural awards from the Clifton Faculty Well-Being Fund, established with a $1million gift from Catherine Roberts Clifton and Anthony J. Clifton to support research projects focused on faculty well-being that mitigate physician stress and burnout.

Two projects – one focused on optimizing use of the myPennMedicine (MPM) patient portal and the other on improving the wellness of critical care faculty   -- were selected in the first round of funding.

“Right-sizing (and Smart-working) MPM Workload for MDs” will focus on team-based, data-driven triage of my PennMedicine messages. The project will work with physicians from different specialties to develop best-practice guidelines to determine what messages do and do not need to be handled by a physician and who should have the authority and responsibility to handle the messages that do not need to go to a physician. The project will also develop strategies for finding time to address messages within the physician’s clinical responsibilities. The project team is led by Susan C. Day, MD, MPH, Professor of Clinical Medicine, and consists of collaborators with clinical expertise in primary care medicine, EHR transformation expertise to work with end users and optimize PennChart support, data analytics to assess improvements, and human factors expertise for workflow design and evaluation development.

“Improving Wellness of PSOM Critical Care Faculty” will develop and evaluate strategies to reduce burnout and improve wellness among critical care faculty across multiple departments. Building on the success of a rotation scheduling pilot program in the HUP Medical ICU and other data gathered by the Critical Care Committee, the project will employ focus groups to develop strategies to improve the working environments of ICUs more broadly. Specifically, the project will employ a two-pronged approach of positive deviance evaluation and stakeholder-driven intervention mapping. The project will also assess the efficacy of one or two strategies implemented within three ICUs using a difference-in-difference methodology. The project team is led by Meeta Prasad Kerlin, MD, MSCE, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine and a core faculty member of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research Center, and Mark Mikkelsen, MD, MSCE, Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine and medical director of the Penn-Presbyterian Medical ICU.

 Please join us in congratulating Drs. Day, Kerlin, Mikkelsen, and their project teams as they work together to promote clinician vitality and foster wellbeing at Penn Medicine.