Other Projects

National Cancer care collaborative is a focus area for VA CASE, the goal of which is to develop and deploy effective industrial engineering tools for planning, tracking and guiding various cancer care treatment processes. With guides from ISE faculty and Ms. Yu, our student team becomes the technical leader in this program and our team travels to numerous VA medical centers from coast to coast to implement and coach the implementation of our technical tools.

National Telephone Care Collaborative

National telephone care collaborative is another focus area of VA CASE, the goal of which is to find effective ways to reduce waiting time for callers and improve service quality for three types of telephone care centers; pharmacy, triage and scheduling. Dr. Yang, Ms. Yu, and Ms. Anupama Chitrangana are able to conduct comprehensive data analysis to help identify key factors affecting these call centers’ speed of answer and caller abandonment rate. Drs. Chinnam, Murat, Ellis, and Monplaisir along with our student team also led the ‘Pharmacy Call Center Redesign Project’ that studied five options for call center consolidation for VISN-11 VA network.

Operating Room Simulation Models

Surgery operation is the most expensive operation in all medical centers. Improving surgery operational efficiencies is always one of the top priorities in medical centers operations. ISE’s simulation team, led by Dr. Murat and Ms. Jihan Wang, developed and validated two versions of the simulation model: operational and tactical. The operational model is used to predict, monitor operating rooms’ utilization levels and identify potential efficiency killing factors and evaluate remedial measures. The tactical model is developed for process re-design and capacity analysis to determine equipment requirements and capacity requirement of the supporting processes. We have developed several simulation models for Detroit, Ann Arbor and Indianapolis VA medical centers.

National Reusable-Medical-Equipment (RME) Management Project

Many types of medical equipment/devices used in key functional areas, such as surgery, examination and checkups, are reusable equipment. After each application, these devices/equipment need to go through sophisticated reprocessing processes to ensure cleanliness. Zero infection risk, availability and traceability of equipments with reprocessing jobs, cases, and patients’ usage are important considerations. Current practices are prone to noncompliance of reprocess procedures and process traceability is poor. ISE team, lead by Dr. Yang, has initiated the following three programming approaches for RME reprocessing:

1. A human factor based interactive visual process navigator, which is a touch screen based work instruction program that guides operator to perform reprocessing jobs exactly according to optimized procedure and captures vital reprocessing data for quality control and analysis. This work is being led by Drs. Yang and Ellis. VA CASE has provided an initial grant and our pilot program has been very well received from national VA leadership. This effort will receive significant funding for development and nationwide implementation ($300,000 to ISE of Wayne State in 2010-2011).

2. Design evaluation procedure that establishes reprocessability index for reusable medical equipments: with this index system, we can identify the models of equipments that are difficult to reprocess and having high risk of infections so these equipments will be discontinued; this effort is led by Drs Kim, Monplaisir, and Yang. This effort is awarded $160,000 in 2010-2011 funding for testing in Michigan and Indiana.

3. Simulation and staffing model for optimized capacity, manpower, and operations planning. This effort is lead by Drs. Murat and Chinnam. This project is awarded $160,000 funding for 2010-2011.

VA’s Capability Improvement Grant

On September 1, 2009, the faculty members from ISE, Drs. Yang, Chinnam, Ellis, and Murat were teamed with Detroit VA Medical Center and submitted a proposal for ‘Capability Improvement Grant worth $1.35 million. While more than 150 VA medical centers submitted proposals, only 20 centers nationwide received funding. Our proposal was ranked number 1 in this round of competition. IME will receive substantial amount from this capability improvement grant. Five faculty members will work on 18 projects in Detroit VA medical center, covering administrative, inpatient, and outpatient areas.

VA T 21 Projects

Please join the ISE Department in congratulating Dr. Kai Yang for receiving $400,000 of new funding for projects under the VA T21 initiative. These 4 projects are:
1. RTLS – IVN Interface Module (FIP - Facility Independent Protocol)
2. Enhancement and Expansion of IVN with OR Operations and SPD Practices
3. Implementation of IVN in Ann Arbor VAMC
4. Patient Discharge Process Non-Compliance and Re-admission Reduction
T 21 is an VA initiative directed by Secretary of Veteran Affairs, Eric Shinseki to transform VA in the 21st century. Each project will receive $100k/year, for a total of $400k/year of new funding starting in May 2011. All 4 nationwide VERCs submitted proposals. Our VERC received 6 of the 11 available funded projects.