The 2019 Improving PrimAry Care Through Industrial and Systems Engineering Conference (I-PrACTISE) hosted by the Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute (HSyE) of Northeastern was a great success. It was held on June 2-4 in Boston in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. 

 

The conference agenda included a pre-conference workshop that gave an introduction of systems engineering in healthcare covering process design, quality improvement, modeling, and human factors with hands on applications in all areas covered using sample tools from each area (SADT, fault tree analysis, simulation, NASA’s TLX). 

 

There were four remarkable keynote speeches. Dr. Joseph Kimura, the Chief Medical Officer of Atirus Health talked about the challenges and opportunities in affordable care and population health. Dr. Gordon Schiff from Harvard Center for Primary Care talked about what we know about diagnostic errors in primary care and future opportunities. Dr. Michael Kanter, the Medical Director of Quality & Clinical Analysis at Kaiser Permanente Southern CA Medical Group talked about redesigning primary care beyond the primary care office visits. Dr. James Benneyan, the Director of the Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute (HSyE) talked about systems engineering in healthcare, the triple aim and thinking differently.

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The conference had two panels; one on The AHRQ Patient Safety Learning Labs featuring three learning labs; Engineering High Reliability Learning Lab (Boston), Patient Imaging Quality and Safety Laboratory (New York), and Brain Health Patient Safety Learning Laboratory (Indianapolis), and the other panel on The CMS Practice Transformation Networks.

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Participants chose from various parallel sessions covering various topics including modeling clinic operations, challenges of primary care, practice workflow, scaling systems engineering in healthcare, information management, clinician-engineer collaboration, caregiver burden, population health, human factors, and patient engagement. 

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HSyE Director Dr. James Benneyan has been appointed as the director for the annual I-PrACTISE conference. He announced that I-PrACTISE 2020 will take place in Wisconsin Madison from March 22nd to 24th.