August/September 2007
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Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering

Healthcare Technical
Assistance Program

Discovery Park

Purdue University

Regenstrief Institute

IUPUI Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research

Register today for the Regenstrief Center fall symposium, Transforming Healthcare Delivery - Advancing Multidisciplinary Research at Purdue. More

People
 > Healthcare Technical Assistance Program appoints associate     director. More

 > Who’s who in MANN 225. More

 > Technical director represents Regenstrief Center at     workplace design workshop. More

Projects
 > National Science Foundation funds RCHE research in     patient scheduling. More

 > First annual Helene Fuld Summer Institute held by the     Purdue School of Nursing. More

Partners
 > The Regenstrief Foundation funds $2.5 million in     supplemental grants to Purdue. More

Progress
 > Registration available for fall 2007 symposium on advancing     multidisciplinary healthcare research at Purdue. More

 > Regenstrief Center Brownbag Speaker Series resumes on     Sept. 14. More 

 > Healthcare engineering pioneer speaks at Purdue on Sept.     25. More

 > Regenstrief Center Advisory Committee to hold inaugural     meeting. More

Publicity
 > Discovery Park to launch scheduled public tours of research     facilities this fall. More

Healthcare Technical Assistance Program appoints associate director

Mary Anne Sloan

Mary Anne Sloan, a Purdue University graduate with extensive administrative experience in nursing, managed care and the military has been named the first associate director of the Regenstrief Center’s Healthcare Technical Assistance Program, focusing on performance improvement in healthcare. Sloan, whose first day in the new position was June 11, will work to connect researchers across the campus and Discovery Park with industry for healthcare related projects.

“Mary Anne has a thorough knowledge of the challenges and opportunities in healthcare systems,” said David McKinnis, director of Purdue’s Technical Assistance Program. “Under her leadership, this program will increase its capability and capacity to transform the healthcare delivery system.”

Sloan will develop, oversee and evaluate performance-improvement contracts and partnerships that Purdue reaches with healthcare providers. She also will focus on expanding the program into additional segments of the healthcare industry, working closely with the Regenstrief Center and its strategic partners, McKinnis said.

“The Healthcare Technical Assistance Program’s mission works in tandem with the Regenstrief Center as we aggressively focus on transforming healthcare delivery systems by applying the principles of engineering, management and science,” said Steven M. Witz, director of the Regenstrief Center. “Mary Anne’s experience provides an ideal fit for directing and overseeing quality and performance improvement activities in the healthcare industry.”

Sloan has served in several administrative positions for United Healthcare and Arnett Health Plans in Lafayette. She began her nursing career with the U.S. Navy and worked in a variety of healthcare settings including critical care, ambulatory and managed care. She received a master’s of business administration from the University of Phoenix.

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Who's who in Mann Hall 225

This fall, the Regenstrief Center will welcome new faces to Mann Hall Suite 225. Regenstrief Center staff will be joined by faculty, staff and graduate students associated with three center initiatives - Doctorate of Nursing Practice program, the Healthcare Technical Assistance Program, and research focused on health policy and outcomes.

The office environment, which features offices, reconfigurable cubicle areas for RCHE faculty and graduate students, “hotel” space for visitors and a conference room with polycom technology, is designed to facilitate collaboration among faculty, students and center collaborators. “Having an office in Mann Hall truly enhances interdisciplinary collaboration,” said Laura Sands, professor in the School of Nursing. “I particularly value the informal hallway discussions about current and planned research projects.”

With the exception of Regenstrief Center, faculty and graduate students will be housed in Suite 225 on a project basis. “Our space is intended for
research that advances our center,” said Ken Musselman, Regenstrief Center strategic collaborations director. “It is important that the use of space flows with the dynamic demands of research.”

Researchers associated with the Regenstrief Center also can take advantage of its dedicated conference room, complete with video and phone conferencing equipment. Scheduling requests should be directed to Mary Schultz at shultm@purdue.edu or (765) 494-9828.

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Technical director represents Regenstrief Center at workplace design workshop

Jim McGlothlin

Jim McGlothlin, associate professor of health sciences and the Regenstrief Center’s technical director, participated at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health workshop, “Prevention by Design” on July 9-11 in Washington, D.C. The invitation-only workshop launched a 7-year national initiative to promote the widespread adoption of Prevention through Design (PtD) principles, which address occupational safety and health in the design of workplace facilities, materials, equipment, tools, and operations in order to prevent or minimize the risk of work-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths.

The workshop brought together leaders from diverse disciplines and industry sectors to explore what constitutes good design for occupational safety and health, and why it is critical to business success. A growing number of business leaders are recognizing PtD as a cost-effective means to enhance occupational safety and health. McGlothlin participated in both the hospital design and wholesale and retail trade sectors developed by workshop organizers.

NIOSH's PtD partners and co-sponsors of the workshop were the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the American Society of Safety Engineers, the Center to Protect Workers’ Rights, Liberty Mutual, the National Safety Council, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, ORC Worldwide, and the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.

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National Science Foundation funds RCHE research in patient scheduling

Mark Lawley

Nearly all aspects of medical clinic operations are driven by the patient schedule, which determines the arrival time and rate of patients to the clinic. Clinical managers and physicians are usually quick to identify inadequate patient scheduling as a major source of operational inefficiency and patient dissatisfaction. Although clinical scheduling has a long research history, clinical impact has been limited. The expertise to implement advanced scheduling methods does not exist in most clinics, and clinical information technologies do not easily support data and computational needs. In addition, many published methods inadequately address many routine and important factors that complicate optimal scheduling.

Mark Lawley, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue and RCHE faculty, has been awarded $459,000 over three years by the National Science Foundation to develop optimal patient scheduling methods. His research team includes Kumar Muthuraman, Purdue professor of industrial engineering; Laura Sands, Purdue professor of nursing; and Deanna Willis, medical director of quality and medical management with the Indiana University Medical Group.

"One of the most vexing problems is patient no-show, when patients do not show up for scheduled appointments," said Lawley. "No-show patients introduce significant uncertainty into daily clinical operations and limit clinic accessibility to other patients by scheduling appointments that are not kept. One of our major goals will be to better understand no-show behaviors and use that knowledge to optimize the use of clinic time and resources."

Beyond its intellectual merits, Lawley's research will have broader impact through implementation into two large clinics associated with the Indiana University Medical Group. "The work will directly impact the needs of the most vulnerable in our society," said Lawley. "These particular clinics provide primary care to a large urban population of indigent and uninsured patients that is disproportionately minority. They also serve a high percentage of Medicare/Medicaid patients who are either elderly or socio-economically disadvantaged."

Pre- and post-implementation studies will measure patient satisfaction, clinic access, waiting times, and clinic efficiency (i.e., operating revenues and costs). The grant also will fund cross-disciplinary internship and education programs for graduate engineering students and medical residents with the two participating clinics.

Lawley believes that the potential impact of this line of research is very high. "Given that there are approximately 200,000 non-psychiatric outpatient clinics in the United States, our efforts to optimize scheduling could improve access and lower costs nationwide, helping to ensure that patients can receive the care they need, when they need it."

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First annual Helene Fuld Summer Institute held by the Purdue School of Nursing

The Purdue School of Nursing offered two new courses this summer with a focus on healthcare engineering as a part of the first annual Helene Fuld Summer Institute. The courses, taught by Purdue engineers to doctoral students of nursing practice, were sponsored in part by a grant from the Helene Fuld Health Trust, the nation’s largest private foundation devoted exclusively to student nurses and nursing education.

During one week of intensive classroom instruction, students explored the application of systems-engineering methods to improve the quality, efficiency and safety of healthcare delivery. The first course, co-taught by RCHE faculty Mark Lawley, RCHE founding director Joe Pekny, and research scientist Seza Orcun, provided a general overview of systems approaches to healthcare. RCHE faculty Vince Duffy offered the second course with a focus on human factors in healthcare. Students then completed field work to apply these methods in the healthcare settings in which they work.

Julie Novak

“The goal of these courses, and the doctorate of nursing practice program in general, is to equip a new generation of nursing leaders who will create genuine change in health policy, delivery systems and patient care," said Julie Novak,professor and head of the School of Nursing and primary investigator of the Fuld Grant. “Interdisciplinary partnerships and support from foundations like the Fuld Trust takes us to the next level in realizing our goals for nursing and for safer, more effective and more efficient patient care."

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Regenstrief Foundation funds $2.5 million in supplemental grants to Purdue

The Regenstrief Foundation has awarded two supplemental grants totaling $2.5 million for research initiatives associated with the Regenstrief Center. The funded initiatives propose state-of-the-art research to improve primary care access and transform cancer care in the U.S. healthcare system.

Primary care, described as the backbone of the nation’s health system, is reported to be at grave risk of collapse because of an imbalance between patient demand and current delivery system capacity. Research indicates that unless practice solutions can be found, there will not be enough primary care physicians to take care of an aging population with growing incidence of chronic disease. The Regenstrief Center proposed a three-pronged approach to improving primary care access and disease management:

Patient scheduling: As many as 23 to 33 percent of patients in a recent survey indicated an inability to obtain a timely appointment with their primary care physician. The Regenstrief Center will develop, implement and validate advanced scheduling methods to improve clinic access by reducing appointment waits and decreasing economic waste associated with appointment no-shows.

Telehealth: Telehealth technologies are showing increasing potential for facilitating chronic care management characterized by evidence-based care and physician-patient collaboration. The Regenstrief Center will examine the ability of telehealth to support effective and individualized treatment plans to manage chronic disease.

Research data management: Research in areas such as chronic care management and prevention involve large amounts of complex data, and often data is not useable in its current form. The Regenstrief Center will acquire server hardware and database software, establish an RCHE database manager staff position and hire graduate students with discipline-specific knowledge to manage de-identified data that is high quality and easy to access.

The Regenstrief Foundation also funded a cancer care engineering proposal developed by the Oncological Sciences Center and Regenstrief Center at Purdue University and the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis. With an initial focus on colorectal cancer, the initiative includes the development of visual, statistical, and agent-based models to understand how cancer prevention efforts, treatment decisions, implementation of evidence-based practices and insurance pricing impact patient outcomes and the healthcare system as a whole.

The ultimate goal is the development of a cancer care situation room, a visual analytic environment where state and nationwide medical records, medical claims, individual biological or “omics” data, and other large cancer data sets can be analyzed for trends in real-time and enable treatment and policy decision making.

American College of Physicians. The Impending Collapse of Primary Care Medicine and its Implications for the State of the Nation’s Health Care. January 30, 2006.

Struck BC, Cunningham PJ. “Treading Waters: American’s Access to Needed Medical Care 1977-2001.” Washington, DC: Center for Studying Health System Change. March 2002.

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Registration available for fall 2007 symposium on advancing multidisciplinary research

The Regenstrief Center’s fall symposium, Transforming Healthcare Delivery: Advancing Multidisciplinary Research at Purdue University, is an opportunity for Purdue researchers to learn about the progress of multidisciplinary healthcare research on campus, network with colleagues and students with similar research interests and establish multidisciplinary partnerships to pursue new healthcare research directions. The symposium will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 18 from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in Purdue's Stewart Center.

Last year’s symposium, co-sponsored by the College of Engineering, highlighted healthcare research in a variety of engineering fields. This year’s symposium will highlight research advances in liberal arts, science, nursing, social sciences and management. An impressive line-up of speakers and session leaders from Purdue and other collaborating institutions will be featured.

The symposium is free to Purdue faculty, students, staff and collaborators. For more information and to register, visit www.purdue.edu/rche/fall2007. Questions? Contact Mary Schultz with the Regenstrief Center at mschult@purdue.edu or (765) 494-9828.

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Brownbag Speaker Series resumes on Sept. 14

The Regenstrief Center's Brownbag Speaker Series is geared toward Purdue students who are interested in healthcare delivery research and want to know about the latest developments at Purdue. A new area of healthcare research is presented each week, with opportunities for questions and discussion. The series is held on Fridays at 11:30 am in Mann Hall 203.

Faculty and other Purdue collaborators have found value in attending the series as well. "The brownbag sessions are a great, informal way to learn about healthcare-delivery research outside of one's own area of expertise and to exchange ideas with RCHE faculty and students, said Leroy Schwarz, Louis A. Weil, Jr. Professor in Purdue's Krannert School of Management.

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Healthcare engineering pioneer speaks at Purdue on Sept 25

Walton Hancock

“Hospital Systems: Impacts on Cost and Quality”
Walton M. Hancock, Ph.D., University of Michigan
Tuesday, Sept. 25; 1:30-2:30 p.m.
West Faculty Lounge, Purdue Memorial Union. Public reception to follow.
Co-sponsored by the School of Industrial Engineering

There are 5000 hospitals in the United States, all with inpatient admissions, operating rooms, nurse staffing and patient assignments, clinical and outpatient scheduling, ancillary staffing and laboratory ordering systems. Unfortunately, not enough attention has been paid to adopting the best systems for these processes, resulting in excess costs and quality issues. Walton Hancock, professor emeritus of health management and policy and professor emeritus of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan, will discuss new developments in healthcare systems, the results that have been achieved and the challenges to implementation.

Hancock’s career includes involvement in manufacturing quality and production systems and hospital operational systems. He has done consulting and research in over 20 hospitals and healthcare organizations, and has co-authored two books on healthcare, Cost Control in Hospitals and “The ASCS” Inpatients Admissions Scheduling and Control System.

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Regenstrief Center Advisory Committee to hold inaugural meeting

The Regenstrief Center will welcome a prestigious group of healthcare leaders for the first meeting of the center’s Advisory Committee on Wednesday, Sept. 12. The committee, led by Dale Compton, Ph.D., will provide advice on emerging issues and trends in healthcare delivery, effective applications of healthcare engineering, and key opportunities for collaboration with others interested in health systems improvements. The committee is made up of leaders of healthcare engineering and clinical practice, including five members of the National Academy of Engineering and two members of the Institute of Medicine.

Members include:

• Dale Compton, Advisory Committee Chair and the Lillian M. Gilbreth Distinguished Professor of Industrial Engineering Emeritus at Purdue University
• Tom Budinger, professor and chair of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley
• Michael Carter, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Toronto
• Nancy Dickenson-Hazard, chief executive officer of Sigma Theta Tau International, Honor Society of Nursing
• Randolf Hall, vice provost for research advancement at the University of Southern California
• Vinod Sahney, senior vice president and chief strategy officer for corporate strategy, planning and business development at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
• Ken Stella, former president of the Indiana Hospital&Health Association
• August Watanabe, chairman of the board of BioCrossroads; former president of Lilly Research Labs
• Steven Witz, Regenstrief Center director
• David Zilz, clinical professor emeritus, University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy; former director of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics

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Discovery Park will begin offering formal public tours this fall at Purdue University's research facilities in the Birck Nanotechnology Center, Bindley Bioscience Center, Gerald D. and Edna E. Mann Hall, and the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship.

With four buildings and a fifth in the planning stages now, Discovery Park officials want the public to see how the $350 million interdisciplinary research complex is helping Purdue and the nation find solutions to challenges in areas such as energy, cancer, healthcare, homeland security, nanotechnology and advanced manufacturing.

"We are inviting the community to see up close what incredible facilities, instruments and laboratories we have for Discovery Park faculty, researchers and students that are helping benefit our state and nation's overall economy," said Candiss Vibbert, associate vice provost for engagement at Purdue and associate director for engagement in Discovery Park. "The community also will continue to be an important partner as we expand Discovery Park and the types of research we tackle in its state-of-the-art facilities on campus."

The public tours, which must be scheduled in advance, will run from 30 minutes to an hour. They will start at the $7 million Burton D. Morgan Center, which was the park’s first building to open in 2004. Visitors will also learn about the healthcare, cancer, advanced anufacturing and homeland security activities housed in the $12.4 million Mann Hall, which opened in May 2007. From there, visitors will see the life sciences activities in the $15 million Bindley Bioscience Center and the nanotechnology research under way at the $58 million Birck Nanotechnology Center, both dedicated in Oct. 2005. For more tour information, visit www.purdue.edu/dp.

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