Another proposal of how we can use tools developed in other disciplines to improve health care delivery.
Should we consider this mechanistic or systems?
Are we dealing with a phenomenon in the zone of certainty or the zone of complexity?
cheers
jd
Engineering Science And Episode-Based Hospital Payment – Health Affairs Blog
This is an interesting idea. Actually medical sciences were isolated from other major fields of science for a very long time, and so does health services research. I will be interested in seeing what an expert on engineering think about our current health care system. One thing confusing me though is that the article did not mention what kind of engineering (civil, mechanical, electric, etc?) should be applied. Overall, I like the idea because engineering may facilitate the distribution of resources and promote fairness.
ReplyDeleteI found this interesting and think that an article like this is rather important in raising awareness of the value of engineering science as a viable method for studying health care costs and efficiency. This is especially true as hospital are being provided with new incentives to improve efficiency in the Affordable Care Act and as it becomes increasingly important to slow rates of Medicare hospital spending. I followed up and read a little about queuing theory and variability methodology, and I believe that continuing and expanding application of these and other ideas from engineering will only help to improve efforts in preventing costs increases while steadily improving patient flow issues. It also highlights the multi-disciplinary nature of a field such as health services research which can utilize individuals from the basic science, social sciences, engineering sciences, and obviously much more.
ReplyDeleteThe Institute for Health Care Optimization (one of the article authors is CEO) has a short and easy to follow explanation of variability methodology here: http://www.ihoptimize.org/what-we-do-methodology-variability-methodology.htm.
Also, in our reading and discussion of systems theory, I couldn’t help but think about other interdisciplinary domains such as industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology and especially the study of human factors engineering as additional outside sciences that could prove immensely useful when applied to health care. While I-O is usually applied to improving performance from a human resources standpoint, it could also be expanded to examine system organization and specific issues such as patient flow.