Know your Philly firsts | Philly Health Insider

This week’s newsletter is a party of sorts to celebrate the 248th birthday of the United States — and no party is complete without a game.

We start off with a quiz testing your knowledge about the “firsts” that Philly’s premier medical institutions can claim.

We then bring you up to speed on a busy news week: ChristianaCare attending physicians formed a union (speaking of firsts), Crozer lost its bid to keep its surgical residency alive, and Cooper completed the acquisition of a hospital on the Shore.

Also, what’s happening at Benefits Data Trust, and where did Ala Stanford land a faculty appointment? Let’s get into it!

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— Abraham Gutman and Aubrey Whelan, Inquirer health reporters, @abrahamgutman and @aubreywhelan.

In celebration of Philadelphia, the nation’s birthplace, we put together a quiz to test your knowledge of the “firsts” for which our medical institutions can claim bragging rights. (You are welcome, America!)

Before diving in, we also wanted to highlight a few Philadelphians who pioneered medicine as we now know it: Of course, we start with Benjamin Franklin, who founded the nation’s first hospital (Spoiler alert: This is the first item in our quiz). That’s also where Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, worked. A few blocks away, Nathan Francis Mossell, Penn’s first Black medical graduate, founded one of the nation’s first Black owned and operated hospitals, Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital.

Let’s name drop a little more: While working on a lab bench at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Baruch Blumberg discovered the hepatitis B virus, winning him the Nobel Prize. Hilary Koprowski, who developed the polio vaccine, led the Wistar Institute. And at the University of Pennsylvania, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman cracked the code on the mRNA technology that powered the first COVID-19 vaccines — and earned the scientists Philly’s latest Nobel Prize.

Now it’s your turn: how well do you know the “firsts” that Philadelphia’s premier medical institutions can claim? Give our quiz a try!

Want more? Check out the full quiz. You can also find the answers to these three questions at the bottom of the newsletter.

This week’s number: $21,000.

That’s how much a patient with glioblastoma would have to pay every month for Tumor Treating Fields therapy.

Penn researchers are testing an experimental treatment using TTF on the aggressive brain cancer. It pairs AI-powered MRIs with a device that sends electric fields through the brain to keep cancer cells from growing. The MRI takes the tumor’s “temperature” to flag the earliest signs of its return, allowing doctors to swiftly pivot their care plan.

In a phase 3 trial, patients who wore the device 70-80% of the time lived an average of 21 months, compared to 15 months among the patients who received standard treatment. The FDA first approved the TFF therapy device, made by Swiss pharmaceutical company Novocure, in 2011.

“The overall survival of this disease hasn’t changed in the last 25 years,” Suyash Mohan, Penn’s director of neuroradiology research, said. “We have to reassess how we approach this tumor.”

Each week, we highlight the results of various hospital inspections in the region. Up this week: Kensington Hospital. State inspectors did not conduct an on-site investigation between November 2023 and April.

Teens are filling gaps in their sexual education with advice from social media influencers that is sometimes “sus“ — to borrow Gen Z slang.

Some teens are reportedly scared to use birth control because of misinformation on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Nemours experts Courtney Kaye, a pediatric resident, and Rima Himelstein, an adolescent medicine specialist, want parents to talk to their kids about sex.

“Parents, even if your teen is not sexually active, you should make sure they’re getting accurate information about birth control,” they wrote for The Inquirer.

Ala Stanford is joining the University of Pennsylvania with a triple appointment.

The surgeon rose to prominence when she founded the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, helping to address the pandemic’s impact on Black people in neighborhoods that the city failed to reach.

Stanford will teach undergraduates in Penn’s biology department, conduct research on health communications at the Annenberg school, and lead the outreach for Drew Weissman’s RNA institute.

“We were able to do a lot with my bank account, GoFundMe, and later some state and federal funds,” Stanford said. “Imagine what we can do with the backing of an institution like Penn.”

She shares how chance encounters that led to this position. And you can hear Stanford tell her full story at her Kimmel Center book launch event next month.

Hospitals are replacing registered nurses with lower paid health-care workers amid a nursing shortage, but a new Penn Nursing study found that having more RNs keeps patients alive.

The study looked at outcomes at hospitals, compared to the percentage of the staff composed of RNs. The researchers found the lower the proportion of RNs, the higher the rate of in-hospital deaths, deaths after discharge, and readmissions.

The study, published in the journal Medical Care, is based on an analysis of the records of nearly 6.6 million Medicare beneficiaries at 2,676 hospitals.

“The findings show that replacing RNs with non-RN staff is dangerous to patients,” Karen Lasater, associate professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

Instead, the researchers recommend that hospitals work to prevent burnout by improving the working conditions of RNs.

📮So how did you do on our quiz? The answers to the three questions above are, in order: Pennsylvania Hospital, Friends Hospital, and Jefferson. We hope you clicked through to take the full quiz! And what’s our region’s most impressive “first” in your area of health care? For a chance to be featured in this newsletter, email us back.

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