ISE magazine Health System columnist Peter Woodbridge details his 2012 visit to the Volvo plant in Goteborg, Sweden, where the logistics of mass customization amazed him. Precision medicine, viewed as the next evolution of healthcare, will need ISE-style control systems to make sure the right care gets to the right patient at the right time. If medical centers remain reactive (feedback) instead of proactive (feedforward), the future will only highlight their system deficiencies.

 

ISE is IISE's membership magazine. Woodbridge is a medical doctor and Veterans Affairs official who has bought into process improvement. He and Tarun Mohan Lal, an industrial engineer and manager of practice optimization and acceleration at the Mayo Clinic, tag team as ISE magazine Health System columnists.

 

Here are their previous four columns:

 

November  (Lal):  Boom vs. bliss in high-tech healthcare  examines the promise and perils of technology in healthcare.

October  (Woodbridge):  Looking in the rearview mirror  explains how ISEs can help overcome hospital staff's resistance to process improvement.

September  (Lal):  Care teams in healthcare - ISEs can help  discusses how care teams can help with physician buy-in.

August  (Woodbridge):  Reinventing lean for healthcare  notes how flexibility is important - you need to speak a different language to get clinical staff on board, as the seven wastes do not resonate with them.

So What Kind of Pushback Do SHS Members Get on Technology Improvements?

We get it. Some folks embrace technology, while others flee to the hills when faced with new operating systems.

So here's an interesting, but long, New Yorker piece from a surgeon and researcher on why doctors hate their computers. The complaints seem valid - ordering mammograms and pap smears that used to take one click now take 3 or 11, and doctors routinely report that staring at a computer takes time away from patients. But the story does detail how these systems benefit patients, who can look up lab results, remind themselves of what medications they should take and read doctors' notes to better understand what they've been told.

So how do SHS members and attendees at the upcoming Health Systems Process Improvement Conference 2019 deal with technology resistors? And how do you balance making things better for clinicians with making things better for patients? After all, if things get bad enough and the doctors quit, that won't do the patients any good.

And, like many who aren't well-versed in the history of industrial and systems engineering, the author takes the obligatory shot at Frederick Winslow Taylor:

 

"The complaints of today's health-care professionals may just be a white-collar, high-tech equivalent of the century-old blue-collar discontent with "Taylorization"- the industrial philosophy of fragmenting work into components, standardizing operations, and strictly separating those who design the workflow from those who do the work. As Frederick Winslow Taylor, the Progressive Era creator of "scientific management," put it, "In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first." Well, we are in that future, and the system is the computer."

 

Here's a piece on Exonerating Frederick Taylor that ISE magazine ran a few years back in your member magazine, where Jesse Brogan took anti-Taylorites to task.

But back to the New Yorker story: How can health systems engineers integrate these huge, expensive, billion-dollar applications and benefit patients without driving doctors from their practices?

Transforming Clinical Outcomes: Implementing Change Theory into Practice

Dec. 13, 2 p.m. Eastern time

Presenter: Khrista Britt, RN, MSN,clinical workflow thought leader, Philips  Healthcare

This presentation will explore in detail key steps and strategies under the framework of Kotter's Change Management theory that "change the narrative" surrounding adoption patient monitoring technology in combination with clinical practice change.

More information and registration

Share Your Knowledge at the 2019 Applied Ergonomics Conference

Abstracts can now be submitted for next year's  Applied Ergonomics Conference as it makes its way to the Big Easy on 

 

March 25-28, 2019.  This is an excellent opportunity for you to present your ergonomics findings, solutions, and expertise with other practitioners from around the world.

The specific educational tracks of the 2019 conference include:

• Advancements in Ergonomics
• Ergonomics In Action
• Ergonomics in Health, Safety and the Environment (HSE)
• Ergonomics Programs
• Master Track
• Multi-Skilled Ergonomics Practitioners
• Office Ergonomics Programs and Applications
• Posters 

Society for Health Systems Scholarship
Sponsored by HealthTrust Workforce Solutions

Available to undergraduate students enrolled full-time in any school in the United States and its territories, Canada and Mexico, provided: (1) the school's industrial engineering program or equivalent is accredited by an agency or organization recognized by IISE; and (2) the student is pursuing a course of study in industrial engineering and operations research with a definite interest in the area of healthcare. The amount of the scholarship is $1,000. Deadline for nominations is Nov. 15. Read more here .