She brought a portable ultrasound probe into an Ebola ward where the X-ray machines never reached. These days she debugs an 18-hospital system the way she once read a bedside scan.
EVP, CHIEF CLINICAL OFFICER & CHIEF QUALITY OFFICER
JEFFERSON HEALTH · PHILADELPHIA
Patricia Henwood spends her days inside a 19,000-person health system, looking for the seam where care quietly breaks. As Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Jefferson Health, and the James D and Mary Jo Danella Chief Quality Officer, she runs OnPoint - the quality and safety program threaded across eighteen hospitals in and around Philadelphia. The work borrows from human-factors and systems engineering: study how people actually behave under pressure, then design the system so the right thing is the easy thing.
It is a long way from a treatment unit in Bong County, Liberia. But it is the same instinct. Henwood has spent her career deciding that the tools good medicine depends on should not stop at the edge of the well-resourced world - and that the gap between what we know and what we deliver is an engineering problem worth solving.
"You just get up the next day and know there's a big job to be done."
In the autumn of 2014 the Ebola epidemic was tearing through West Africa, and Henwood flew to Liberia. She spent five weeks in Bong County, an epicenter, caring for roughly a hundred patients in an Ebola treatment unit. Then she went back in January 2015 for another five weeks as the outbreak slowed.
Conventional imaging was impossible in that setting. So she sought - and got - approval to bring point-of-care ultrasound to the bedside, scanning patients inside the unit to understand what the disease was doing to their bodies. That fieldwork became a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Imaging an Outbreak - Ultrasound in an Ebola Treatment Unit."
She has been blunt about the cost. The death rate sat near 50 percent. There was stigma to overcome, brutal days, and a discipline of safety she had never needed in an American ER.
We knew we could only help if we could keep ourselves and our staff safe - it was a little different than when I work in the ER and I am only focused on our patients' safety.
It was environmentally tough, but overall I am grateful I could use my medical training and global experience to help.
Liberia was not a one-off. In 2011 Henwood founded PURE - Point-of-care Ultrasound in Resource-limited Environments - a nonprofit built on a simple, stubborn idea: a clinician who can scan a patient at the bedside can make a better decision, even with no radiology department down the hall.
Over more than a decade she designed and led training programs across sub-Saharan Africa, teaching local physicians to use ultrasound and then studying whether the skills stuck. Her Rwanda research - published work on knowledge retention and the accuracy of resident-performed scans - asked the unglamorous follow-up question most aid projects skip: did the training actually hold?
She co-chairs the American College of Emergency Physicians' Global Health Ultrasound Subcommittee and advises the Ultrasound Committee of the African Federation of Emergency Medicine.
The thread running through all of it: leave behind people, not just equipment. As she put it of the staff she trained - "Now they're trained to help make a difference in their own community."
Georgetown University - BA, Government
Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Jefferson - MD
Massachusetts General Hospital - Harvard-affiliated EM residency
Brigham and Women's Hospital - emergency ultrasound fellowship
Henwood earned her MD at the same Jefferson medical college whose health system she now helps run. The student became the chief clinical officer.
The same systems thinking that worked abroad, aimed at a Philadelphia ZIP code.
When COVID-19 hit, Henwood pointed the field-honed instinct at her own city. She helped drive testing and vaccination into vulnerable Philadelphia communities and worked to close the equity gaps in who actually got a shot. The OnPoint program she leads has been recognized nationally for moving the metrics that matter - the kind of safety work that rarely makes headlines but quietly keeps people alive. In 2022 Jefferson took home a HIMSS Davies Award for the analytics behind it.
Her through-line, stated plainly across two decades: build more effective, more equitable systems, and shrink the distance between what medicine knows and what patients receive.
She studied government at Georgetown before she ever studied medicine.
Her ultrasound training programs span Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Liberia.
Work she did inside an Ebola unit ended up in the New England Journal of Medicine.