ISE's Healthcare Systems Engineering Research

Overview

ISE has an excellent long tradition and track record in healthcare system engineering research and teaching. The faculty members and studentsparticipated, involved and helped local and national health care institutions for their search for excellence. One of our former faculty members, 2010 Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Industrial Engineering Award winner Dr. Vin Sahney, was a pioneer in healthcare system engineering and the chief architect for Henry Ford Health Systems’ progress in healthcare efficiency and quality for over 20 year. Over the years, the faculty members and students have successfully completed many projects with many healthcare institutions, such as, Henry Ford Health Systems, Detroit Medical Center, and Blue Cross Blue Shield and dealt with such diverse topics as surgery operations, scheduling, and supply chain management.

Our recent breakthrough happened since 2008, when one of our faculty members, Dr. Kai Yang and our student team successfully launched and completed several system redesign projects in John D. Dingell Detroit VA Medical Center. This work was valued highly by Detroit VA leadership, and eventually, one of our students from that team, Ms. Susan Q Yu, became a leader in Detroit VA’s system redesign group. She along with our other students started Detroit VA System Redesign Department and many more successful projects were completed since then, greatly impact Detroit VA operations. We outline here some our major on-going projects that are now impacting large parts of the entire VA Healthcare System.

 

Veteran Engineering Resource Center (VERC) and ISE

In January 2009, The US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) sent solicitation letters to all the engineering colleges of US universities asking for submission of ‘concept papers’ to establish “Veteran Engineering Resource Centers” (VERC). These centers were to be funded by the VA and will be showcases for integrating industrial engineering methods and tools into the fabrics of health care delivery. There were 27 initial submissions and ISE faculty member, Dr. Kai Yang, participated in drafting a concept paper with three VA medical centers (Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Indianapolis) and three universities (WSU, UM Ann Arbor and Purdue). Our concept paper was one of the nine winners. After that, full proposals are submitted by all nine finalists; Dr. Yang and Ms. Susan Yu helped in drafting the initial version of the full proposal. Finally our proposal won and we were selected as one of the four funded Veteran Engineering Resource Centers. Each center is funded at $5 million for two years. Our center is named VISN 11 VA Center of Applied System Engineering (VA-CASE).

The Industrial and System Engineering Department of Wayne State University plays a leading role in VA-CASE as an academic partner. In particular, we played leading roles in the following VA-CASE funded projects:

 

National Cancer Care Collaborative

National Cancer care collaborative is a focus area for VA CASE, the goal of which is to develop and deploy effective industrial engineering tools for planning, tracking and guiding various cancer care treatment processes. With guides from ISE faculty and Ms. Yu, our student team becomes the technical leader in this program and our team travels to numerous VA medical centers from coast to coast to implement and coach the implementation of our technical tools.

 

National Telephone Care Collaborative

National telephone care collaborative is another focus area of VA CASE, the goal of which is to find effective ways to reduce waiting time for callers and improve service quality for three types of telephone care centers; pharmacy, triage and scheduling. Dr. Yang, Ms. Yu, and  Ms. Anupama Chitrangana are able to conduct comprehensive data analysis to help identify key factors affecting these call centers’ speed of answer and caller abandonment rate. Drs. Chinnam, Murat, Ellis, and Monplaisir along with our student team also led the ‘Pharmacy Call Center Redesign Project’ that studied five options for call center consolidation for VISN-11 VA network.

 

Operating Room Simulation Models

Surgery operation is the most expensive operation in all medical centers. Improving surgery operational efficiencies is always one of the top priorities in medical centers operations. ISE’s simulation team, led by Dr. Murat and Ms. Jihan Wang, developed and validated two versions of the simulation model: operational and tactical. The operational model is used to predict, monitor operating rooms’ utilization levels and identify potential efficiency killing factors and evaluate remedial measures. The tactical model is developed for process re-design and capacity analysis to determine equipment requirements and capacity requirement of the supporting processes. We have developed several simulation models for Detroit, Ann Arbor and Indianapolis VA medical centers.

 

National Reusable-Medical-Equipment (RME) Management Project

Many types of medical equipment/devices used in key functional areas, such as surgery, examination and checkups, are reusable equipment. After each application, these devices/equipment need to go through sophisticated reprocessing processes to ensure cleanliness. Zero infection risk, availability and traceability of equipments with reprocessing jobs, cases, and patients’ usage are important considerations.  Current practices are prone to noncompliance of reprocess procedures and process traceability is poor.  ISE team, lead by Dr. Yang, has initiated the following three programming approaches for RME reprocessing:

1. A human factor based interactive visual process navigator, which is a touch screen based work instruction program that guides operator to perform reprocessing jobs exactly according to optimized procedure and captures vital reprocessing data for quality control and analysis. This work is being led by Drs. Yang and Ellis. VA CASE has provided an initial grant and our pilot program has been very well received from national VA leadership. This effort will receive significant funding for development and nationwide implementation ($300,000 to ISE of Wayne State in 2010-2011).
2. Design evaluation procedure that establishes reprocessability index for reusable medical equipments: with this index system, we can identify the models of equipments that are difficult to reprocess and having high risk of infections so these equipments will be discontinued; this effort is led by Drs Kim, Monplaisir, and Yang. This effort is awarded $160,000 in 2010-2011 funding for testing in Michigan and Indiana.
3. Simulation and staffing model for optimized capacity, manpower, and operations planning. This effort is lead by Drs. Murat and Chinnam. This project is awarded $160,000 funding for 2010-2011.

 

National Missed Opportunity Reduction Project

Missed opportunities are major problems in most VA medical centers and they affect resource utilization, efficiency, cost and patient access significantly. When an appointment is scheduled in the VA system and is canceled after appointment time, this appointment is called missed opportunity. Recently, our Ph.D. candidate Adel Alaeddini and Dr. Yang have developed an accurate no show prediction model that can predict each patient’s no show probability for the upcoming appointment with high accuracy. This achievement is well received in VA and a joint proposal with WSU team and University of Pittsburg team is approved for funding. (Wayne State University’s share is $600,000).

Spring 2011 VERC Newsletter

 

VA’s Capability Improvement Grant

On September 1, 2009, the faculty members from ISE, Drs. Yang, Chinnam, Ellis, and Murat were teamed with Detroit VA Medical Center and submitted a proposal for ‘Capability Improvement Grant worth $1.45 million. While more than 150 VA medical centers submitted proposals, only 20 centers nationwide received funding. Our proposal was ranked number 1 in this round of competition. IME will receive substantial amount from this capability improvement grant.  Five faculty members will work on 18 projects in Detroit VA medical center, covering administrative, inpatient, and outpatient areas.  

 

VA National Project

The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering has been awarded a $600,000 grant as a part of VA National project. The award entitled "Analysis of Predictors and Development of Scheduling Models and Best Practices to reduce Missed Opportunities", will be jointly performed by the Katz Business School of University of Pitssburg and ISE of WSU, under the coordination of VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System Veterans Engineering Resource Center - VAPHS-VERC, as well as VISN 11 VA CASE.

The PIs for WSU are Kai Yang and Alper Murat. This awarded is credited to the development of the "no show" model paper by Adel Alaeddini, Kai Yang and Susan Yu that received the best paper award at the last Industrial Engineering Research Conference.

 

VA T 21 Projects

Please join the ISE Department in congratulating Dr. Kai Yang for receiving $400,000 of new funding for projects under the VA T21 initiative. These 4 projects are:

1. RTLS – IVN Interface Module (FIP - Facility Independent Protocol)
2. Enhancement and Expansion of IVN with OR Operations and SPD Practices
3. Implementation of IVN in Ann Arbor VAMC
4. Patient Discharge Process Non-Compliance and Re-admission Reduction

T 21 is an VA initiative directed by Secretary of Veteran Affairs, Eric Shinseki to transform VA in the 21st century. Each project will receive $100k/year, for a total of $400k/year of new funding starting in May 2011. All 4 nationwide VERCs submitted proposals. Our VERC received 6 of the 11 available funded projects.