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The healthcare system faces an imperative need for reform to address the decreasing economic growth, escalating costs, needs of a growing aging population, high consumer expectations, and advances in medical knowledge and technology. With a rapid output of technological innovations and structural changes of organizations, the healthcare industry appears to be in the midst of its “new industrial revolution,” marked by tremendous opportunities and challenges. Opportunities include a rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge, advanced medicine, sophisticated facilities and treatment methods, and IT systems for healthcare management. Challenges include increased consumer expectations and demands, increasing costs, international competition, a need to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational processes, and a need to maintain empathic, personal relationships with consumers despite the inherently impersonal nature of new technology used during and as the forum for clinical interactions. |
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Healthcare costs in the U.S. represent more than 15% of the nation’s total GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and hospital payments have been, for thirty years, the single largest components of health costs. These high costs are directly affecting the population’s wellbeing and the nation’s competitiveness. Also, deficiencies in the current healthcare system’s service quality, resource utilization, strategy, adaptability, productivity gains, all indicate an urgent need to improve healthcare system in terms of service safety, quality and cost (SQC). |
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What is the right approach for realizing the potentials of healthcare improvements? This is the crucial question. There is little published literature about the systems context within which sophisticated equipment, personnel, and computer systems must be integrated to provide high quality, safe and efficient healthcare services. Based on lessons learned from system improvement efforts in the industrial sectors during the past two decades, we consider that a systems approach is an important basis for future efforts in healthcare improvement (Wu, Klein and Stone, Healthcare Systems Engineering ? an Interdisciplinary Approach to Achieving Continuous Improvement, International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, Feb 2006). This view has been firmly confirmed recently by a recent report from a committee jointly supported by the the National Institutes of Health and the Institute of Medicine entitled: Building a Better Delivery System: a New Engineering/Health Care Partnership, 2005, at: http://www.nap.edu/books/030909643X/html ). Based on this approach, the Center has been carrying out a number of initiatives, including: |
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- Publications that help to lay the conceptual foundation of Healthcare Systems Engineering.
- With funding from National Science Foundation (CCLI program. Project title: Healthcare Systems Engineering ? Context, Contents and Pilot Implementation, the Center is developing and pilot implementing a Healthcare Systems Engineering (HSE) program for engineering undergraduate students at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The MU HSE team include faculty from the MU College of Engineering (Industrial Engineering), MU School of Medicine - Health Management and Informatics, MU University Hospitals and Clinics, and MU College of Education.
- In collaboration with MU Hospital and Clinics, and MU VA Hospital, on-going graduate and undergraduate projects in healthcare delivery improvements.
- In collaboration with MU School of Medicine, on-going project to investigate how system engineering techniques can be made relevant to healthcare, and in particular how these techniques can be incorporated into MU’s well-known Problem-Based Learning (PBL) model of teaching and learning in medicine.
- A network of interested partners
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