Penn PORTAL Congratulates Cycle 2 Learning Health System Clinician Leaders and Scientist Investigator

April 15, 2025

Excerpt

Congratulations to the Penn PORTAL Cycle 2 Awardees Drs. Arina Chesnokova, Thomas Savage, and Stephanie Van Decker!

Penn PORTAL is excited to announce the awardees of Cycle 2 Learning Health System (LHS) Clinician Leaders and Scientist Investigator. Penn PORTAL is designed to accelerate progress toward an integrated LHS at Penn. By combining formal didactic training, tailored mentorship, and support from research and operations professionals, Penn PORTAL trains the next generation of health system operations leaders and independently funded LHS investigators.

Read on to learn more about the Penn PORTAL Cycle 2 awardees. For more information about the Penn PORTAL program, click here.

Arina Chesnokova, MD, MPH, MSHP, MSCP

LHS Pathway

Scientist Investigator

Dr. Chesnokova is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a physician at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, and an LDI Senior Fellow. She is interested in midlife and menopause care with a focus on eliminating disparities in obstetrics and gynecology and uplifting underserved communities. Dr. Chesnokova’s project will be directed towards Penn Medicine physicians with the goal of improving the menopause care trajectory for all women. Her project is titled, “Advancing Menopause Care: Investigating Barriers and Implementing Solutions for Menopausal Hormone Therapy Prescribing.”

Thomas Savage, MD

LHS Pathway

Clinician Leader

Dr. Savage is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Hospital Medicine and specializes in natural language processing and computer vision, working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and other transformer-based modeling systems. His career goal is to design and test artificial intelligence (AI) informatics workflow solutions to improve the experience for clinicians and patients across all populations. His project is titled, “Implementation and Outcome Evaluation of Large Language Model Summarization Applications for Hospital Operations and Clinical Care.”

Stephanie Van Decker, MD, MS

LHS Pathway

Clinician Leader

Dr. Van Decker is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine, a Clinical Lead of General Pulmonology, a Core Faculty for the Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Curriculum for the Internal Medicine Residency Program, and an LDI Associate Fellow. Dr. Van Decker is committed to addressing language barriers for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients and improving healthcare delivery for underserved and socioeconomically complex patient populations. The primary goal of her LHS quality improvement project is to understand and address barriers to providing language-concordant care. Her project is titled, “Enhancing Equitable and Consistent Access to Language Services to Patients at Penn Medicine.”