New York City-based NYU Langone Health recently launched About Me, an initiative that allows patients to share short personal details with their care teams. When admitted, each patient is asked to complete the sentence: “We want to get to know you as a person, not just a patient. What you should know about me is …”
Responses appear in NYU Langone’s Epic EHR and are visible to every clinician who interacts with the patient. Entries range from hobbies and family milestones to cultural backgrounds — information that helps staff build a rapport and tailor communication.
The program, now active across 35 inpatient units, started with an idea from Katherine Hochman, MD, director of hospital medicine at NYU Langone. As a hospitalist, she often meets new patients and wanted a consistent way for teams to quickly establish trust.
“I used to write in my daily progress note, ‘65-year-old gardener,’ ‘45-year-old astronaut,’ as a reminder that this is more than just the disease in bed five,” Dr. Hochman said. “It worked for me, but it wasn’t sustainable. That’s why I went to Paul and said, ‘Can we have something like this in Epic that everybody can see?’”
Dr. Hochman’s conversation with Paul Testa, MD, NYU Langone’s chief health informatics officer, led to the creation of a digital version that could scale across the health system.
“Kathy’s concept was about how you capture something that isn’t inherently clinical but is incredibly important to treating somebody,” Dr. Testa said. “When you make something digital, it scales. You can flip a switch and it’s everywhere, but the art is in getting people to adopt it.”
To make the process seamless, the team used existing Epic functionality. Patients receive a text message linked to the MyChart app inviting them to fill out About Me once they are admitted. Bedside and virtual nurses can also complete the section during intake for patients who prefer to share verbally.
According to Dr. Testa, approximately 70% of entries are currently captured by nurses and 30% by patients and families. The goal is to reverse that ratio by refining how and when the prompt is sent, part of what he described as “rapid A/B testing for user experience,” experimenting with different message phrasing and timing to improve response rates.
The information is easily accessible within the EHR.
“You just hover over the patient’s name and the About Me pops up,” Dr. Hochman said. “When I’m reviewing labs and notes before I meet a patient, I also look at their About Me. I’ll start by saying, ‘We’ll get to the heart failure in a second; tell me a little about you.’ It helps people feel seen and heard.”
Dr. Hochman said the feature has also improved collaboration among staff. Because entries are visible to everyone involved in a patient’s care, they give team members, from transporters to dietitians, a shared reference point.
“It allows all these very busy people to feel integrated around the patient,” she said. “The patient senses that cohesion and thinks, ‘Hey, these people are actually talking to one another.’”
Dr. Testa views About Me as part of a larger effort to make empathy systematic within digital care tools.
“Healthcare already leverages the currency of narrative,” he said. “Lots of docs add details to notes because it changes how we understand a patient. Making that process digital just makes it systematic and sustainable.”
As NYU Langone prepares to extend About Me to ambulatory clinics in 2026, the infrastructure is already in place.
“Technically, it’s easy because we’re one integrated system and we’re using tools Epic already provides,” Dr. Testa said. “The harder work is doing it respectfully and learning from how patients and clinicians actually want to use it.”
For Dr. Hochman, the goal is simple.
“It’s not high tech,” she said. “It’s about creating small opportunities for connection that make care better for both patients and providers.”
