Education

The Healthcare Systems Engineering Summer Internship Program provides in-depth, hands-on experiences for industrial and systems engineering undergraduate students nationwide. This past summer, interns from across the U.S. once again converged in Boston to work on applied research problems in dozens of healthcare systems affiliated with HSyE's centers. Feedback about the program continues to grow, with interns having an increased understanding of health systems, the triple aim, and the application of ISE to healthcare. Overall, in the past two years, there has been a tenfold increase in applicants to the program and in requests for new projects from local health systems. We hope to share good news about expanded funding soon. Read more. 

Rachel Miller, MS candidate Industrial Engineering Photo by Taylor McLelland

What experience have you gained here?

Research

Article by Angela Herring
"Improving the nation's healthcare system requires significant collaboration across disciplines," said Northeastern's President Joseph E. Aoun. One of the few groups that do this kind of groundbreaking work is the Center for Health Organization Transformation (CHOT), an industry-university cooperative research center located at Northeastern, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, and Penn State and funded by the National Science Foundation. In October, students and faculty from the Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute presented the results of a score of interdisciplinary projects at a meeting for members of the center. President Aoun underscored that this type of interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to addressing global challenges. "Every project should do what you are doing: namely, partner with others to change the world." Read more. 

 

Emergency department crowding and boarding is a widespread problem, typically linked with patient flow and bed capacity problems. We develop and validate a simple method for predicting ED-to-inpatient bed demand in real-time over the course of a day, to assist unit managers in allocating resources and managing discharges. The approach uses logistic regression estimates of patient admissions as inputs to a probability convolution of the mean, variance, and distribution of the total number of admissions hour-by-hour. Results perform quite well, compared to expert opinion and a Bayes conditional probability model, with a receiver operating characteristic AUC of 0.887. A subsequent publication illustrates the method's generalizability across a range of hospital sizes and demographics. Read more. 

Application

As part of patient-centeredness and otherwise, healthcare is moving towards team-based models that encourage improved continuity of care and communication among healthcare providers. This in turn results in better care, better outcomes, higher satisfaction, more trusting relationships, better preventative health compliance, and fewer avoidable admissions and revisits. Continuity, however, is a particular challenge in primary care due to the complex logistics of patient coverage, especially when residents are involved. A project within our CMS Extension Center therefore developed a scheduling method to optimize coverage and continuity of family medicine teams. The challenge lies in creating schedules that provide appropriate distribution of session coverage to create maximum continuity. The method is currently being piloted at the Cambridge Health Alliance family clinic in Malden, MA, resulting to-date in increased care continuity by an average of roughly 20 percent. Read more. 

November 22