With the support from the National Science Foundation, we are 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.

This program has the primary aim of providing students with multidisciplinary (engineering, healthcare process, management, operational and strategic) skills and a broader viewpoint than the traditional approach. Its system-oriented approach will teach our students to approach a problematic situation in healthcare improvement through a systems perspective, by encouraging the students to consider healthcare activities in their entirety, utilizing systems concepts such as objectives, relationships and transformation and communication.

The development of the curriculum follows a novel HSE framework, providing an effective way to present and teach a diversified range of multidisciplinary topics within a logically integrated HSE curriculum, including:

• Systems class: Systems Perspective of Modern Healthcare. The concepts and ideas of systems study for the purpose of healthcare system design and improvement will cover topics such as the generic concepts of systems (in terms of systems perspective, system structure, system processes, system communication, system hierarchy and control, and the prerequisite conditions for effective system operation), and a specific systems understanding of healthcare processes.

• Healthcare class: Introduction to Healthcare Structure, Technologies and Operations. Knowledge of the types of healthcare, the technical characteristics of various elements of advanced technology and the operations of a healthcare system are obviously prerequisites for the analysis of a healthcare system.

• Systems Engineering class: Methodologies and Tools of Systems Engineering. This area involves the techniques of systems analysis, which can be used as a general framework to tackle various problems associated with a healthcare systems design and evaluation project.

• Healthcare Systems class: Healthcare Systems Analysis and Design. The systems concept, the analytical methodologies, and the technological aspects of healthcare elements need to be brought into an overall framework of healthcare systems design and improvement, through two interrelated models: (i) A reference architecture model, that provides a system’s perspective of healthcare, and (ii) An analysis and design process model, that identifies the key functional areas, specifies the necessary steps, tasks, relevant analytical tools and theirs relationships, and then combines them into a closed-loop to support a structured problem-solving approach, and to provide the basis for an integrated approach of continuous system improvement.

• Capstone Project (continuous system improvement in healthcare). Students will work in teams, and work with the sponsoring hospitals or healthcare-providers, to solve a real-life problem related to issues of healthcare improvement.

Successful development and implementation of this program will help to fill a significant skill gap by providing qualified healthcare systems analysts with a system engineering background and a thorough understanding of systems approaches to the design and operation of healthcare systems so that they can correctly incorporate all the necessary elements into a system is effective in terms of service quality, patient safety, and system costs.