Regenstrief conference to highlight evidence-based guidelines in health-care delivery
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering's annual fall conference on the Purdue University campus will highlight the benefits of using evidence-based guidelines and research to improve the delivery of health care.
The Sept. 20 event, titled Bench to Bedside: The Development and Application of Evidence-Based Guidelines, will include talks by health-care industry experts Richard Norling, former president and chief executive officer of Premier Inc., and Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the industry accreditation and certification agency The Joint Commission.
The conference, which is free and open to the public, will run from 8:30 a.m. to noon in Discovery Park's Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121. Norling is scheduled to present at 9 a.m., and Chassin's talk will begin at 10:15 a.m. A question-and-answer session at 11:15 a.m. will wrap up the event. Registration is encouraged by going online to https://www.purdue.edu/dp/rche/
"Evidence-based guidelines present one opportunity to ensure more consistent care across providers and regions, but research shows that they are used only about half of the time," said Steve Witz, director of Discovery Park's Regenstrief Center. "As evidence-based guidelines again come into focus, this conference will highlight the benefits of using research and evidence-based guidelines as a tool to improve health-care delivery."
Joint Commission accreditation and certification is recognized worldwide as a symbol that reflects an organization's commitment to quality improvement and to meeting state-of-the-art performance standards. In addition, Chassin leads the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare. Established in 2009, the center works with the nation's leading hospitals and health systems to address the industry's most critical safety and quality problems such as care-associated infection, hand-off communications, wrong-site surgery and medication errors.
Chassin also was the Edmond A. Guggenheim Professor of Health Policy, founding chairman of the Department of Health Policy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and executive vice president for excellence in patient care at The Mount Sinai Medical Center. Before joining Mount Sinai, he was commissioner of the New York State Department of Health.
Norling served as president and CEO of Premier, the nation's largest health-care alliance, from 1997-2009. Under his leadership, Premier received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2006 and was named one of the Most Ethical Companies in the World by Ethisphere and Forbes magazine in 2008 and 2009.
He also was president and CEO of Fairview Hospital and Healthcare System, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-based company that served the entire state through its network of hospitals, clinics and other service sites. In addition, he was a board member of American Healthcare Systems, which later merged with Premier Healthcare Alliance and SunHealth Alliance to form Premier Inc.
Regenstrief Center, which is Purdue's only integrated university-wide research effort in health-care engineering, was launched five years ago with a $3 million grant from the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Foundation. The foundation expanded the partnership in 2007 with grants of more than $14 million for additional research projects through 2013.
The Purdue center was borne out of the 2004 report "Building a Better Delivery System: A New Engineering/Healthcare Partnership" by the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. Co-written by Purdue industrial engineering professor W. Dale Compton, the report outlined ways that systems engineering could help deliver safe, effective, timely, efficient, equitable and patient-centered care.
Writer: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu
Sources: Steven Witz, 765-496-8303, switz@purdue.edu
Amira Zamin, 765-494-7075, azamin@purdue.edu