GNYHA’s inaugural Health Care Systems Engineering Community of Practice meeting on June 28 included presentations by systems engineers at Montefiore Health System, Mount Sinai Health System, Northwell Health, and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. GNYHA’s Engineering Community of Practice is a platform for individuals in the systems engineering field to meet, network, learn, share, and get peer feedback.
The meeting was co-hosted by Colin Walsh, Management Engineer in Montefiore’s Performance Excellence Department, who discussed working with physicians and providing incentives to those able to achieve both quality and cost-reduction goals through Montefiore’s Triple Aim Gain Sharing Program.
The Community of Practice format is a supportive, peer-based setting that provides professional development opportunities for health systems staff who present on behalf of their organizations. Representatives from Northwell’s Department of Clinical Transformation reviewed the application of improvement methodologies, including Six Sigma; Lean; Plan, Do, Study, Act; Fast Track Decision-Making; discrete-event simulation; and Change Acceleration Process. Strategic Operations and Implementation Department staff at Mount Sinai shared their experiences using value stream mapping to share recommendations to improve scheduling, patient flow, and care coordination in the Pre-Admission Testing Center. An operations analyst from NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell discussed the benefits of simulation modeling to optimize patient flow on the new ambulatory surgery floor at the David H. Koch Center. Each presentation demonstrated measurable improvements in quality, patient safety, and patient experience.
GNYHA plans to continue the Community of Practice forum to support hospitals that invest in this unique and valuable discipline, as well as those interested in learning more about the application of systems science in the health care field.