Healthcare Systems Engineering
My background is in healthcare systems engineering -- and many people have no idea what that is. I'm not sure that I've found the best way to explain it yet, but here's an approach I often take:
My brother is a transportation systems engineer for the MTA in New York City, and that's exactly what it sounds like. He uses modeling, statistics, and tons of data to analyze where trains, buses, and people go. For a morning commute or an evening adventure, on a day with bad flooding, or the night after New Year's Eve. He helps the system work better as a whole, across all these scenarios.
I do that too, except for hospitals.
It's not just a matter of how much time patients spend in different parts of the hospital, or how long they have to wait -- though that is a big part of it. It's also about how the materials flow, how safety is maintained, how schedules are set and adjusted, how IT systems are used, how rooms are organized, how medical decisions are made, and how budgets are set. And most importantly, it's about how that's all connected.
Much of my work in this area has been conducted through an ongoing relationship with the Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute (HSyE) at Northeastern University. I started working at HSyE as an undergraduate Industrial Engineering student, testing the applicability of various machine learning methods for predicting readmission to the Emergency Department. I soon got into modeling professional healthcare networks and the dissemination of best practices, in collaboration with a then-post-doc, now-professor Dayna Martinez. A couple years ago, Northeastern published an article featuring this work.
After graduating, I worked for a couple years as an Engineering and Policy Fellow at HSyE, leading small teams of students as they learned by doing: working on real consulting projects for real health systems around Boston. Below is a summary of the systems engineering methods my teams used most heavily, as well as the various healthcare domains in which we worked.
Over time, I found that most of all, I enjoyed mentoring young engineers and students. Fortunately for me, at the same time, the summer internship program at HSyE exploded by an order of magnitude.
We needed to find work for all these interns to do -- and then we needed to manage it all. This worked out fantastically for me. For two summers, I was able to run a number of projects, teach, and learn. To the left is an example of an early project meeting. I am explaining the concept and code behind a model to a group of terrific students so that they could begin to work with it.
Over that same period and since then, my academic goals and work have been increasingly shaped by an intense interest in public policy. After minoring in economics and loving a course I took in health policy, I knew that I wanted to apply the tools of systems engineering not just to hospital operations, but also larger questions of health policy...