RCHE - e-Newsletter

Researchers aim to strengthen community within healthcare engineering signature area

Researchers from the Regenstrief Center and e-Enterprise Center were recently awarded a Signature Area Community Building Grant from the Purdue College of Engineering to fund new initiatives aimed at increasing student involvement, developing new educational opportunities and enhancing collaboration within the college’s healthcare engineering signature area.

The proposal, submitted by Seza Orcun (e-Enterprise Center), Nan Kong (Biomedical Engineering), Vincent Duffy (Industrial Engineering), Mark Lawley (Biomedical Engineering), Mimi Arighi (Veterinary Teaching Hospital), Christopher Stines (Veterinary Teaching Hospital), Sandra Amass (Veterinary Clinical Sciences, Purdue Homeland Security Institute) and Stephen B. Hooser (Comparative Pathobiology, Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory) includes the development of a web-based library of complex healthcare-engineering "challenges" and case studies. All interested faculty, students, Regenstrief Center healthcare partners and other researchers are invited to access and contribute to the library, which will serve as a foundation for research and collaboration throughout the signature area. A blog associated with each challenge will facilitate cyber discussions among faculty, students and other researchers.

To promote student use of healthcare-engineering challenges in their coursework, a three-tier student competition will be piloted in spring 2009. “We decided to provide incentives directly to students to tackle the challenge problems as a part of their course work in a creative and self-motivated fashion,” said Orcun. “In this way, fellow students and faculty who may not be aware of the healthcare engineering signature area will hear about it in a context related to their course.”

The first 50 project teams to register and successfully complete a course project using one of the healthcare challenges will be awarded $50. An additional $50 may be awarded to projects that rank among the top 10% of all projects submitted in respective courses. Project teams also will have the opportunity to give a ten-minute presentation on the economical and cultural feasibility of their solution for the chance to win an additional $500.

The Purdue Veterinary Teaching Hospital will serve as an on-campus proxy for human healthcare environments. “Veterinary medicine utilizes the same technologies, same treatment modalities and same drugs as human medicine which leads to similar healthcare delivery and engineering problems,” said Orcun. “The less fragmented nature of veterinary medicine, loyalty and compliance of pet owners to providers and care protocols, and the less regulated nature of veterinary clinics provide additional opportunities to conduct comprehensive studies focusing on the dynamics of healthcare.”

Informal community gatherings, called “Coffee & Chat,” also are planned to bring together students, healthcare engineering researchers and faculty for brainstorming and collaboration.

Spring conference attracts healthcare leaders, faculty and students

More than 100 faculty, students and healthcare professionals attended the Regenstrief Center’s fourth annual spring conference, Research Solutions in Healthcare: Successes, Challenges and Lessons Learned, on April 22 in Discovery Park. Conference sessions included presentations from both academics and healthcare professionals, highlighting the advances made in collaborative research and opportunities to strengthen interdisciplinary relationships. PowerPoint presentations are available for viewing at www.purdue.edu/rche/spring2008.

“Some of the challenges we face in delivering healthcare seem too complicated to address,” said Deanna Willis, M.D., M.B.A., Medical Director of Quality and Medical Management for the Indiana University Medical Group and a conference presenter on her collaboration with Purdue researchers to improve patient scheduling. “Working with Purdue engineers and statisticians has changed that perception. It’s been liberating to tackle a complex and significant issue like patient scheduling. Strong communication between the research team and site personnel has been, and will continue to be, key to successfully translating our research findings into practice.”

Michael
Hindmarsh

The conference’s keynote address was given by Michael Hindmarsh, former Associate Director of Clinical Improvement of the MacColl Institute. During his 15 years with Group Health's Center for Health Studies, Hindmarsh has managed federally-funded research studies and various internal clinical improvement efforts. He also has directed the design and implementation of two of Group Health's population-based clinical improvement efforts: the Diabetes Roadmap and the Depression Roadmap. As part of that work, Mike and his colleagues created one of the country’s first registries of patients with diabetes. His current work involves design and development of a national dissemination strategy for implementing the Chronic Care Model.

The Regenstrief Center’s next conference is this fall on Sept. 16 in the Burton D. Morgan Center. The conference, Transforming Healthcare Delivery: Advancing Multidisciplinary Research at Purdue University, is an annual 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. More information and registration will be available later this summer.

Steven Witz, Regenstrief Center director, and Kenneth Musselman, strategic collaboration director, participated in the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Engineering Roundtable on Evidence Based Medicine, April 29-30 in Washington, D.C. This workshop of key leaders, titled Engineering a Learning Healthcare System: A Look at the Future, explored potential strategies for achieving a “learning healthcare system,” in which evidence is applied and developed as a natural product of patient care. Dale Compton, chair of the RCHE Advisory Council and Lillian M. Gilbreth Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering, gave a keynote address highlighting how systems engineering can foster a healthcare system that delivers effective care and learns from the care delivered.

Leroy Schwarz, RCHE academic director and the Louis A. Weil, Jr., Professor of Management at Purdue, presented the session, “What Can Health Care Supply Management Learn from Consumer Product Supply Chains?”, at the VHA, Inc. Leadership Conference in Philadelphia, May 4-7. The conference, which is VHA’s showcase educational event, was exclusively for finance, materials, nursing, operations, pharmacy and physician leaders and other healthcare professionals that are members of the VHA alliance of more than 1,400 not-for-profit hospitals and 21,000+ non-acute care organizations nationwide.

Schwarz’s session covered the findings of a Regenstrief Center research study that explored the differences and commonalities of the healthcare supply chain and the consumer products supply chain.

McGlothlin, Leonard and Bidassie teach Lean Six Sigma for Healthcare at public health symposium

Jim McGlothlin, RCHE technical director and associate professor of health sciences, Brian Leonard, HealthcareTAP’s performance improvement projects manager, and Balmatee Bidassie, doctoral student and certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, presented a pre-symposium workshop on "Lean Six Sigma for Healthcare Professionals" at the U.S. Public Health Service Scientific and Training Symposium in Tucson, Arizona, June 6-12.

The 30 participants who attended the day long session as a part of the symposium learned the basics of Lean Six Sigma and guidelines to apply in their own organizations. “Lean Six Sigma is one of today’s leading techniques to maximize efficiency and maintain control over each step in managing healthcare systems,” said McGlothlin. “With this workshop, we wanted to show participants how they could reduce complexity and achieve major cost reductions within each of their unique organizations.”

Kenneth Musselman, the Regenstrief Center's strategic collaboration director, presided as president over the Institute of Industrial Engineers Annual Conference, May 17-21 in Vancouver, British Columbia. More than 40 presentations were offered in the health and service systems research track, which included the following presentations from Regenstrief Center-affiliated researchers:

   > "Characterizing Inpatient Hospital Flow from Information Systems Messaging"
      Renata Konrad, Mark Lawley & Yuehwern Yih, Purdue University
      Scott Lambert, Ascension Health

> "Patient Assignment and Scheduling in a Physicians' Network"
Mark Lawley, Ayten Turkcan & Bo Zeng, Purdue University

   > "A Hybrid Method for Sequential Clinical Scheduling"
      Ji Lin & Mark Lawley, Purdue University
      Kumar Muthuraman, The University of Texas at Austin

   > "Batch-order Preparation at a Central Inpatient Pharmacy"
      Paul Intrevado, McGill University
      Steven R. Abel, Purdue University
      Reha Uzsoy, North Carolina State University

   > "A Game Theoretical Approach for Hospital Stockpile in Preparation for Pandemics"
      Po-Ching DeLaurentis & Mark Lawley, Purdue University
      Elodie Adida, University of Illinois at Chicago

   > "Determine Optimal Policy for Community Mitigation Strategies During Influenza Pandemic"
      Feng Lin & Mark Lawley, Purdue University
      Kumar Muthuraman, University of Texas at Austin

   > "Optimal Time of Intervention for Hemodialysis Patients with Arterio-Venous Fistula or Graft"
      Santanu Chakraborty & Mark Lawley, Purdue University
      Kumar Muthuraman, University of Texas at Austin