Closing the Loop by Operationalizing Systems Engineering and Design (CLOSED)
Motivation:
Specific Aims :
Aim 1:​Use systems engineering and patient engagement to design, develop, and refine a highly reliable “closed loop” system for diagnostic tests and referrals that ensures diagnostic orders and follow-up occur reliably within clinically- and patient-important time-frames.
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Aim 2: Use systems engineering and patient engagement to design, develop, and refine a highly reliable “closed loop” system for symptoms that ensures clinicians receive and act on feedback about evolving symptoms and physical findings of concern to patients or clinicians.
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Aim 3: Design for generalizability across health systems more broadly so that the processes created in Aims 1 and 2 are effective in (1) a practice in an underserved community, (2) a large tele-medicine system, and (3) a representative range of simulated other health system settings and populations.
Partners:
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Approach:
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Results to Date:
James Benneyan, PhD
Executive Director
Dr. James Benneyan is a leading authority on healthcare systems engineering, founding director of two federally-awarded healthcare engineering centers, and professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Northeastern University. Benneyan has served as director, co-director, principal investigator, or Co-PI in seven engineering research centers, and research laboratories totaling over $32 million in funding. His research focuses on mathematical modeling and optimization of healthcare systems broadly, with particular emphasis and area expertise in patient safety, access, logistics, comparative effectiveness, quality, and treatment optimization.
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Benneyan formerly served as a director of the NSF Center for Organization Transformation, the New England VA Engineering Resource Center, and Northeastern’s Quality and Productivity research laboratory. The work of these three enterprises collectively integrated academic research, real-world application, and workforce development. Methods research foci include statistical quality engineering, probabilistic optimization, computer simulation, risk-adjusted statistical methods, rare events, spatial surveillance, risk-benefit and comparative effectiveness models. Benneyan has published over 100 papers and served as senior or associate editor of four academic journals in the above areas, has received several teaching, service, and research awards, and has taught engineering to ages 6 through 60.
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Professor Benneyan is the former vice president of the Institute for Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), past president of the Society for Health Systems (SHS), senior fellow and faculty at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, fellow of SHS and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), and former operations research faculty for Northeastern’s NSF-NSEC Center for High-Rate Nanomanufacturing (CHN), and board member or advisor for several healthcare organizations. Prior to joining Northeastern, he was senior systems engineer for Harvard Community Health Plan, principal of Productivity Sciences Incorporated, and an industrial engineer at IBM and later Digital Equipment Corporation. Primary funding sources include the National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health, Veteran’s Health Administration, National Institute for Drug Abuse, Regenstreif Institute, United Network for Organ Sharing, U.S. Air Force Surgeon General’s Office, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
