Having Iowa’s largest medical center on campus created a valuable opportunity for a trio of University of Iowa industrial and systems engineering (ISE) students to improve patient care and hospital operations.
Sherise Eagen, of Hunter, North Dakota; Connor Vicory, of Aurora, Illinois; and Braden Vidmar, Bettendorf, Iowa; spent a semester embedded in a University of Iowa Health Care inpatient unit learning the ropes of the hospital room cleaning process.
The team of undergraduates tackling their senior design requirements analyzed workflows, shadowed environmental services (EVS) and nursing staff, investigated data on more than 10,000 documented room cleanings, and conducted staff surveys.
Their end goal was to use engineering to standardize operational processes, yielding practical benefits for everyday healthcare workers and patient care and safety, as well as other operational processes.
Working with a broad group of hospital sponsors, the team designed a web-based room cleaning dashboard paired with near field communication chips in rooms. The system tracks room status (dirty, clean, available), establishes a 25-minute minimum cleaning window, and provides a live, shared checklist for both nurses and EVS, improving communication at role boundaries.
“Our system is focused on communication and tracking rather than just enforcement,” Eagen said.
Partners at UIHC sought to standardize cleaning processes through observational study, data gathering, data processing and analyzation, quality control methods, and process management techniques. They saw practical benefits for everyday healthcare workers, patient care, and safety, as well as application to other operational processes.
“(This project) can be extended and applied to other processes like nurse assignment and scheduling or to other domains like therapeutic product manufacturing or food industry,” the hospital sponsors said.
The project also underscores healthcare as a viable career pathway for engineers, particularly ISEs.
"Those jobs might be under a variety of different job names but ultimately, there's tremendous applicability of their training to healthcare,” the sponsors added.
Menghan Liu, ISE assistant professor of instruction, and Geb Thomas, ISE professor, advise ISE senior design. The partnership with UI Health Care has empowered industrial engineering students to apply systems thinking and process improvement to real healthcare challenges, they said.
“Projects like this give students hands-on experience while helping improve patient safety and operational effectiveness,” Thomas said.
Liu added, "Industrial engineering is rooted in designing systems that work better for people, and there are few environments where that matters more than healthcare.”