Apply engineering and design principles to revitalize the healthcare delivery system Healthcare Systems Engineering is the first engineering book to cover this emerging field, offering comprehensive coverage of the healthcare system, healthcare delivery, and healthcare systems modeling. Written by leading industrial engineering authorities and a medical doctor specializing in healthcare delivery systems, this book provides a well-rounded resource for readers of a variety of backgrounds. Examples, case studies, and thoughtful learning activities are used to thoroughly explain the concepts presented, including healthcare systems, delivery, quantification, and design. You'll learn how to approach the healthcare industry as a complex system, and apply relevant design and engineering principles and processes to advance improvements. Written with an eye toward practicality, this book is designed to maximize your understanding and help you quickly apply toward solutions for a variety of healthcare challenges. Healthcare systems engineering is a new and complex interdisciplinary field that has emerged to address the myriad challenges facing the healthcare industry in the wake of reform. This book functions as both an introduction and a reference, giving you the knowledge you need to move toward better healthcare delivery. Understand the healthcare delivery context Use appropriate statistical and quantitative models Improve existing systems and design new ones Apply systems engineering to a variety of healthcare contexts Healthcare systems engineering overlaps with industrial engineering, operations research, and management science, uniting the principles and practices of these fields together in pursuit of optimal healthcare operations. Although collaboration is focused on practitioners, professionals in information technology, policy and administration, public health, and law all play crucial roles in revamping health care systems. Healthcare Systems Engineering is a complete and authoritative reference for stakeholders in any field.

It has been almost 20 years since the Institute of Medicine released the seminal report titled, Crossing the Quality Chasm. In it, the IoM identified six domains of care quality (safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-centric) and noted a huge gap between the current state and the desired state. Although this report received a great deal of attention, sadly there has been little progress in these areas. In the U.S., healthcare still has huge disparities, is inefficient, and is fragmented with delays in care that are often unsafe. Most U.S. citizens are expected to suffer from a diagnostic error sometime during their lifetime, not receive a large fraction of recommended care, and pay for one of the most expensive systems in the world. Much has been written about quality improvement over the years but many prominent quality and safety experts. Yet progress has been slow. Some have called on the healthcare professions to look outside of healthcare to other industries using examples in nuclear power and airlines for safety, the hotel and entertainment industry for a ‘customer’ focus, and the automotive industry, particularly Toyota for efficiency (Lean). This book by Dr. Oppenheim on lean healthcare systems engineering (LHSE) is a fresh approach that brings forth concepts that systems engineers have used in huge national defense projects. What’s unique in this book is that these powerful system engineering tools are modified to be able to address smaller sized healthcare problems that still involve similar problems in fragmentation and poor communication and coordination. This book is an invaluable reference for a new powerful process named Lean Healthcare Systems Engineering (LHSE) for managing workflow and care improvement projects in all clinical environments. The book applies to ambulatory clinics and hospitals of all types including operating rooms, emergency departments, and ancillary departments, clinical and imaging laboratories, pharmacies, and population health. The book presents a generic rigorous but not mathematical step-by-step process of integrated healthcare, systems engineering and Lean. The book also contains the first major product created with the LHSE process, namely tabularized summaries of representative projects in healthcare delivery applications, called Lean Enablers for Healthcare Projects. Each full-page enabler table lists the challenges and wastes, powerful improvement goals, risks, and expected benefits, and some useful descriptions of the healthcare system of interest. The book provides user-friendly solutions to major problems in healthcare delivery operations in all clinical environments, addressing fragmentation, wastes, wrong incentives, ad-hoc and stove-piped management, lack of optimized processes, hierarchy gradient, lack of systems thinking, “blaming and shaming culture”, burnout of providers and many others.

Improving our nation's healthcare system is a challenge which, because of its scale and complexity, requires a creative approach and input from many different fields of expertise. Lessons from engineering have the potential to improve both the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery. The fundamental notion of a high-performing healthcare system-one that increasingly is more effective, more efficient, safer, and higher quality-is rooted in continuous improvement principles that medicine shares with engineering. As part of its Learning Health System series of workshops, the Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Value and Science-Driven Health Care and the National Academy of Engineering, hosted a workshop on lessons from systems and operations engineering that could be applied to health care. Building on previous work done in this area the workshop convened leading engineering practitioners, health professionals, and scholars to explore how the field might learn from and apply systems engineering principles in the design of a learning healthcare system. Engineering a Learning Healthcare System: A Look at the Future: Workshop Summary focuses on current major healthcare system challenges and what the field of engineering has to offer in the redesign of the system toward a learning healthcare system.

In a joint effort between the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, this books attempts to bridge the knowledge/awareness divide separating health care professionals from their potential partners in systems engineering and related disciplines. The goal of this partnership is to transform the U.S. health care sector from an underperforming conglomerate of independent entities (individual practitioners, small group practices, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, community health centers et. al.) into a high performance "system" in which every participating unit recognizes its dependence and influence on every other unit. By providing both a framework and action plan for a systems approach to health care delivery based on a partnership between engineers and health care professionals, Building a Better Delivery System describes opportunities and challenges to harness the power of systems-engineering tools, information technologies and complementary knowledge in social sciences, cognitive sciences and business/management to advance the U.S. health care system.

With rapidly rising healthcare costs directly impacting the economy and quality of life, resolving improvement challenges in areas such as safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equity has become paramount. Using a system engineering perspective, Handbook of Healthcare Delivery Systems offers theoretical foundation

The US healthcare system has many excellent components; strong scientific input, extraordinary technology for diagnosis and treatment, dedicated staff and top-class facilities among them. But the system has evolved haphazardly over time and although it has not failed entirely, the authors argue that like any system where attention, is paid to individual components at the expense of the system as a whole, it can never hope to succeed. Above all, they point out that the US system does not provide high value healthcare; it has the highest costs in the world and yet many other countries have lower infant mortality rates and better life expectancy. --

The International Conference on Health Care Systems Engineering (HCSE) provided a timely opportunity to discuss statistical analysis and operations management issues in health care delivery systems. The conference took place in Milan between May 22nd and 24th, 2013. Scientists and practitioners discussed new ideas, methods and technologies for improving the operation of health care organizations. The event and this resulting volume emphasize research in the field of health care systems engineering developed in close collaboration with clinicians.​ Topics applicable to researchers and practitioners include: hospital drug logistics, operating theatres, modelling and simulation in patient care and healthcare organizations, home care services.

M-health can be defined as the ‘emerging mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare systems.' This book paves the path toward understanding the future of m-health technologies and services and also introducing the impact of mobility on existing e-health and commercial telemedical systems. M-Health: Emerging Mobile Health Systems presents a new and forward-looking source of information that explores the present and future trends in the applications of current and emerging wireless communication and network technologies for different healthcare scenaria. It also provides a discovery path on the synergies between the 2.5G and 3G systems and other relevant computing and information technologies and how they prescribe the way for the next generation of m-health services. The book contains 47 chapters, arranged in five thematic sections: Introduction to Mobile M-health Systems, Smart Mobile Applications for Health Professionals, Signal, Image, and Video Compression for M-health Applications, Emergency Health Care Systems and Services, Echography Systems and Services, and Remote and Home Monitoring. This book is intended for all those working in the field of information technologies in biomedicine, as well as for people working in future applications of wireless communications and wireless telemedical systems. It provides different levels of material to researchers, computing engineers, and medical practitioners interested in emerging e-health systems. This book will be a useful reference for all the readers in this important and growing field of research, and will contribute to the roadmap of future m-health systems and improve the development of effective healthcare delivery systems.

A complete guide to environmental, safety, and health engineering, including an overview of EPA and OSHA regulations; principles of environmental engineering, including pollution prevention, waste and wastewater treatment and disposal, environmental statistics, air emissions and abatement engineering, and hazardous waste storage and containment; principles of safety engineering, including safety management, equipment safety, fire and life safety, process and system safety, confined space safety, and construction safety; and principles of industrial hygiene/occupational health engineering including chemical hazard assessment, personal protective equipment, industrial ventilation, ionizing and nonionizing radiation, noise, and ergonomics.

Healthcare and well-being have captured the attention of established software companies, start-ups, and investors. Software is starting to play a central role for addressing the problems of the aging society and the escalating cost of healthcare services. Enablers of such digital health are a growing number of sensors for sensing the human body and communication infrastructure for remote meetings, data sharing, and messaging. The challenge that lies in front of us is how to effectively make use of these capabilities, for example to empower patients and to free the scarce resources of medical personnel. Requirements engineering is the process by which the capabilities of a software product are aligned with stakeholder needs and a shared understanding between the stakeholders and development team established. This book provides guide for what to look for and do when inquiring and specifying software that targets healthcare and well-being, helping readers avoid the pitfalls of the highly regulated and sensible healthcare domain are and how they can be overcome. This book brings together the knowledge of 22 researchers, engineers, lawyers, and CEOs that have experience in the development of digital health solutions. It represents a unique line-up of best practices and recommendations of how to engineer requirements for digital health. In particular the book presents: · The area of digital health, e-health, and m-health · Best practice for requirements engineering based on evidence from a large number of projects · Practical step-by-step guidelines, examples, and lessons-learned for working with laws, regulations, ethical issues, interoperability, user experience, security, and privacy · How to put these many concerns together for engineering the requirements of a digital health solution and for scaling a digital health product For anybody who intends to develop software for digital health, this book is an introduction and reference with a wealth of actionable insights. For students interested in understanding how to apply software to healthcare, the text introduces key topics and guides further studies with references to important literature.