1. Analyzing Transitions in Clinician Burnout and      the Effects of Interventions

Clinician burnout is a major problem for more than 80% of healthcare systems. Its consequences are reflected on clinicians themselves, patients, and the organization as a whole. Understanding the prevalence, context, and potential of interventions for clinician burnout through a combination of qualitative interviews, data analysis, and model based testing is the objective of this project. 

2. Exploring Different Safety II Methods and            Other New Safety Ideas 

Despite significant progress in improving safety over the years, mainly using basic improvement methods, patient harm remains a major concern. New methods such as safety II have proven to be useful in other industries. Applying and assessing the utility of new safety methods to a problem of interest to the health systems is objective of this project.

3. Understanding Equity from a Systems                  Perspective

The quality and accessibility of care should not be affected by personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status. This project aims to provide a systems engineering perspective on understanding how those characteristics drive inequitable healthcare services, and what we can do to prevent that. This is a candidate project to be launched in 2021.

4. Statistical Process Control (SPC)

The importance of healthcare system processes being in a state of statistical control is understated, with SPC charts at the forefront of measurement tools. This is a candidate project to be launched in 2021.

5. COVID-19, Opioid, and Vaping Epidemic              Modeling

The COVID-19 pandemic truly highlights the need for effective modeling tools that accurately capture the day-to-day changes to data. This can also be applied to the prevalence of opioids and e-cigarettes (vaping) that also exhibit similar characteristics. This is a candidate project to be launched in 2021.

Systems Analysis of Graduate Medical Education Processes 

Robust and Adaptive Optimal Healthcare Staff Scheduling

Analysis and Reduction of Practice Variation

Minimally Disruptive Optimization in Healthcare

Robust and adaptive optimal healthcare staff scheduling

Modeling ACOs as macro integrated systems of care

Improvements to root cause analysis of patient safety events

Analysis and reduction of practice variation

New methods for reducing adverse events and harmful overuse

Cost and consequences of poor care access

System analysis of graduate medical education processes

Reducing unnecessary pre-operative testing

Challenges of a changing care paradigm