Society for Health Systems

NEWS

Newly published book on healthcare delivery improvement

Management Engineering for Effective Healthcare Delivery: Principles and Applications ISBN13: 9781609608729
Author(s)/Editor(s): Alexander Kolker (Children's Hospital and Health System, Wisconsin); Pierce Story (GE Healthcare); Published by IGI-Global, August 2011.

This book illustrates the power of ME methods for making efficient managerial decisions in different areas of healthcare. ME principles of quantitative decision-making presented in this book make it possible to predict performance and real resource requirements allowing decision-makers to be truly proactive rather than reactive. The distinct feature of this book is that it provides an international exposure to this challenging area. Researchers and healthcare practitioners both from U.S. and from Australia, Singapore, Japan, Italy, and Spain contributed to this book.

To find out more about the book click here.

UPCOMING WEBINAR

Lessons from turnover times – The importance of domain specific scientific knowledge

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 1 p.m. Eastern time
Presenter: Franklin Dexter, M.D. Ph.D.
Summary: An appropriately common problem for management (industrial) engineers, analysts, etc., working with surgical suites is to reduce setup and cleanup times. A hospital may explicitly ask for the application of lean approaches to reduce their "operating room turnover times." However, much of the perceptions about turnover times turn out to be due to psychological biases. More information and registration

SHS BLOG

Announcing NEW SHS Blog website

SHS has launched a new blog website: http://shsblog.org/. Posts will cover the whole range of industrial and systems engineering methodologies as they apply to healthcare systems. If there's something in particular you'd like us to write about, please add a comment here. Recent posts include: Project Echo, which describes and analyzes an innovative approach to delivering specialist care to rural and under served populations; a post about telemedicine in South Africa, which is the first of a series about IEs working in healthcare in South Africa; and a dialog about the pros and cons of single-payer healthcare.

CO-SPONSORED CONFERENCES

SEMINARS | WEBINARS

ARTICLES

Lean service lines in healthcare

In this presentation at the 2011 SHS conference, the presenters describe how an integrated service line model and clinical care pathways provide an effective means for continuous improvement.

Situational awareness and workload in the emergency department

Scott Levin PhD, of Johns Hopkins delivered a paper and presentation at the 2011 SHS conference addressing workload factors affecting situational awareness in the ED. The paper is based on 50 hours of ED observation. Part of the research shows the relative frequency and duration for common ED nursing tasks.

UCLA Health System features lean quality improvements in neurological ambulatory clinic services

The UCLA Health System website describes how the Department of Neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA the established a Lean Performance Improvement initiative to improve the foundational quality of care goal by reducing system-waste from a patient-centered perspective. The website features two case studies on the application of lean in an ambulatory clinic setting.

VIDEO

Prescription for good health systems

Vinod Sahney is recognized internationally for his leadership in applying industrial engineering to health systems. IIE honored his remarkable career this year with the Frank & Lillian Gilbreth Industrial Engineering Award. In his acceptance speech, he tells of how the Gilbreths were the first to champion process improvement work in hospitals and challenges IEs to make modern management practices the standard in healthcare organizations. Sahney, who helped found IIE’s Society for Health Systems, recently retired from BCBS of Massachusetts.

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