Hospital staff frequently perform intra-hospital transportation (IHT) as part of healthcare delivery, in which a patient is taken to a different place within the same health facility to receive further technical, mental, or procedural care.
A new paper by Heath Faculty Fellow in Business and Engineering Rupy Sawhney and PhD student Jeremiah Gbadegoye applies a “People-Centric Operational Excellence Model” reliability approach, also known as the “Sawhney Model,” to IHT. This model helps identify reliability components in the process within the system. In the paper, it was applied to a real-life case study of a regional hospital in the United States and helped identify bottlenecks, failure modes, and other problems, as well as IHT reliability components that affect the throughput of the process. It has led to the development of sustainable solutions. By implementing the proposed resilience strategies, the cycle time of the process was reduced by about 40%, which is primarily idle time spent waiting and will greatly reduce employee stress levels.
For their paper “A People-Centric Approach to Enhancing Resilience of Intra-Hospital Transport,” Sawhney and Gbadegoye received a first-place paper award last month at the Lean Six Sigma and Data Science Conference in Atlanta. The event is a meeting of industrial, management, manufacturing and quality engineers, healthcare professionals, consultants, operational and supply chain managers, and professional educators.
“It was my first academic conference in the US,” said Gbadegoye. “I am very grateful to the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering for sponsoring my participation in the conference. Winning the award was a surprise as I didn’t expect it. The conference and the award have left an indelible mark on me that will last a long time and propel me to work harder.”
Professor Sawhney also received another paper award at the same conference, with Post-Doctoral Research Associate Ninad Pradhan and Graduate Research Assistant Omkar Ghosalkar. They earned second-place for their publication “The Role of an Industry 5.0-based People-Centric Operational Excellence Model in Developing Robust Training and Implementation Model.”