To improve healthcare delivery in the world by bringing together systems engineers and systems thinkers in healthcare system to identify, develop, and tailor best practices for the improvement of healthcare delivery. We will achieve that by
- Articulating the value and application of systems engineering to healthcare through simple examples and easily deployable guidelines, and
- Providing a forum for developing and sharing best practices, meeting world class experts in Systems Engineering and Healthcare (and across other industries).
Our on-going goal is to aggregate information that articulates the value and application of systems engineering to the biomedical and healthcare industries and to provide an infrastructure for members and interested non-members to share relevant information.
Our living charter, organization char,t and priorities are provided below.
Leadership
Technical Lead: Chris Unger, Chief Systems Engineer, GE Healthcare (Christopher.Unger@med.ge.com)
Operations Lead: Bob Malins, President, Eagle Summit Technology Associates, Inc. (rjmalins@eaglesummittech.com)
Communications and Membership Lead: Cary Bryczek, Principal Solutions Architect, Jama Software (cbryczek@jamasoftware.com)
Contact incosehwg@gmail.com for additional information.
Recent Accomplishments
2018 Webinars
Webinar (Jan 12th): Doug Dietz presenting “Design Thinking and the Patient Experience”
INCOSE members can view/download a video recording here.
Webinar (Feb 2018): Randy Illiff presenting "How Decision Making Enables the Essential Connection Between Potential and Product"
The public can download the slides here.
Webinar (March 2018) Charles Wasson presenting “Leveraging 21st Century SE Concepts, Principals, and Practices to Achieve User, Healthcare Services, and Medical Device Development Success"
The public can download the slides here.
Webinar (April 2018)
"Conceptual Architecture for Health IT Hazard Auto-detection"
The INCOSE Healthcare Working Groupis very happy to host Kevin Gunn as our March webinar speaker.Kevin is Systems Engineering Principal at theMITRE Corporation supporting projects with the Veterans Health Administration.Kevin’s presentation will explore howhealthcare information technology can create risks and hazards and describe emerging architecture solutions to these hazards.
Webinar (May 2018)
Applying Systems Engineering to Health care: A case study in explaining the Systems approach
Presenter: Richard Beasley, Associate Fellow - Systems Engineering, Rolls-Royce, plc
This presentation will show and explain the UK Royal Academy of Engineering report into “Engineering Better Care”, showing how the principles of Systems Engineering, particularly issues around Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Risk Thinking and People Thinking can be explained and made accessible to the health care domain. The presentation will give an overview of the RAE report, focusing particularly on the “12 critical questions” identified to explain the whole Systems Approach, rather than a description of processes, tools and methods. The questions focus on the purpose of the typical Systems Approach, but make it far more accessible and understandable to non-Systems Engineers. Illustrative examples (from the report) will be shown to show the importance of, and the insights, the different thinking styles can give. Whilst this presentation is focused on an application of health care, the conclusions (and the 12 critical questions) are truly generic, and can be used to introduce / explain the Systems approach in an accessible way in any domain.
The presenter represented Systems Engineering / INCOSE UK in the workshops run by the Royal Academy of Engineering to prepare the report. For pre-reading the report is freely available. Click Here.
Webinar (July 2018)
Interoperability in Healthcare Information Systems using Federated Clouds
Presenter: Prithviraj Mukherji and Kenneth Cureton
The INCOSE Healthcare Working Group is very happy to host Prithviraj Mukherji and Kenneth Cureton as our webinar speakers for July. Raj and Ken are both senior systems engineering consultants, and both serve in senior roles in the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium. Their presentation will describe an architecture that uses both federated clouds and distributed ledger systems for medical data exchange across multiple clouds.
There are two recent developments that impact on how medical information will be shared across geographically dispersed multiple wide area networks. These are: a) federated clouds (FC) bridging multiple private and public networks, and b) distributed ledger systems (DLS) that provide an audit trail useful for data provenance. This paper describes an architecture that uses both federated clouds and distributed ledger systems for medical data exchange across multiple clouds. The proposed architecture is designed to improve access to medical data for healthcare providers, patients and researchers worldwide through use of emerging standards for federated clouds, Health Level 7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource, and blockchain technology.
Webinar (October 2018)
A study of the application of Systems Engineering in Healthcare
Presenter: Bo Oppenheim
The INCOSE Healthcare Working Group was very happy to host Bo Oppenheim as our webinar speaker for October. Bohdan "Bo" W. Oppenheim is a Professor of Systems Engineering at LMU in Los Angeles. He serves as the Director of the Healthcare Systems Engineering Master's Program at LMU, a premiere HSE program in the nation created in close partnership with Kaiser Permanente. Oppenheim is the author of four books and authored and co-authored chapters in six other books and published 30 journal papers. He was honored with three Shingo Awards, INCOSE Product of the Year Award, and INCOSE Fellowship.
The presentation summarized a sabbatical-long systematic study of the potential of the application of Systems Engineering in healthcare. Both healthcare professionals and systems engineers still struggle with the understanding of the new overlapping domain of Healthcare Systems Engineering (HSE), which applies Systems Engineering (SE) to Healthcare. Confusion exists on both sides of the professional fence. Healthcare professionals (medical and administrative) do not appreciate the potential of SE in healthcare, and confuse SE with regular engineering, causing frustration that "regular engineers" are not solving their systems-wide challenges. Many SEs who attempt to transition into healthcare from traditional aerospace/defense programs have only a superficial understanding of the highly unique needs of medicine and healthcare, particularly in the extremely fragmented and sub-optimal U.S. healthcare. Many SEs who try to apply the tools and processes which work fine in aerospace, e.g. MBSE, meet with a lack of interest from healthcare professionals. Knowing that the healthcare share of the U.S. economy is 20%, or $3 trillion, and being used to the defense environment where project schedules are measured in years and budgets in billions of dollars, they tend to be disappointed by the small scale of typical healthcare projects in hospitals and clinics, which are measured in weeks or months, with budgets typically below $200 thousands.These disjunctions cause major gaps between the healthcare needs and the solutions proposed by most systems engineers
4th Annual Systems Engineering in Healthcare Conference 2018
April 19-20, 2018
Visit Conference Website
View a Video of Nathan Torgerson's Keynote Presentation on YouTube
2017 INCOSE International Workshop – Jan 2016 (Torrance, CA)
Healthcare Working Group Open Sessions:
• State of Systems Engineering in Healthcare
• MBSE Challenge Team: MBSE applied to medical devices for risk management and compliance
• MBSE Challenge Team: MBSE applied to capturing the clinical environment for medical devices
• Systems engineering outreach to small business medical device developers
• Working Group Sushi Dinner
Click here for FULL AGENDA.
Society for Simulation in Healthcare
Forum on Modeling and Simulation - January 13-17, 2018
The forum will showcase modeling and engineering applications that improve safety, quality, cost effectiveness, and efficiency in healthcare. There will be breakout sessions on:
• Biology Modeling: cell, organ and disease
• Usability testing
• Healthcare delivery and operational decision support
• Healthcare policy and strategic planning
• Emerging technologies
2016 INCOSE International Symposium - July 2016 (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Invited Panel “Healthcare Invited Content: How systems approaches can keep people out of the hospital?”
Best Paper: “Architectural Parallels between biological and engineered solutions in defence and security” – Brigitte Daniel Allegro and Gary Robert Smith
Healthcare extension to SEBoK
3 additional articles in publication:
Overview of the Healthcare Sector and
Healthcare Systems Engineering for the overview articles.
Public Webinars
(presentation materials and recordings are available to INCOSE members on Connect)
May 2017, Model-based Design of Artificial Pancreas Algorithm Software - Lou Lintereur, Systems Engineering Medtronic Diabetes Intensive Insulin Management Business Unit
April 2017, Systems Engineering in MedTech - Today's Trends and Techniques - Jama Software.
January 2016 "Systems Engineering Template Kits For Small Enterprises" by David M. Cronin, CEO Cognition Corporation
February 2016 "Systems Engineering Concepts Applied to a Hospital Emergency Department" - Dr. Robert J. Malins, Founder, Eagle Summit Technology Associates
March 2016 "Medical Device Agile Systems Workshop Summary" by Dr. Chris Unger, Chief Engineer GE Healthcare
April 2016 "A SysML model of an In-Home Patient Monitoring System" by Myron Hecht, Senior Project Leader at The Aerospace Corporation
May 2016 "Designing Products that Customers Like – Using Observational Studies to Improve Safety and Satisfaction" by Pat Baird, Director of Engineering at Baxter Healthcare
October 2016 "A Systems Approach to Healthcare" - Dr Alana Ravitz
November 2016 "Using Atlas to Map a Healthcare Systems Engineering Career" - Nicole Hutchinson
December 2016 "Medical Simulation 3.0" - Dr Yue Dong MD
Systems Engineering Concepts Applied to a Hospital Operating Room Conference – May 2016 (Arlington, VA)
In partnership with Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation
The workshop brought together clinicians, healthcare simulation experts, medical device manufacturers, and systems engineers to evaluate and refine an emerging systems engineering modeling approach to healthcare operations, with the specific focus on the operation room.
2016 INCOSE Conference on Agile Systems in Health Care
(May 23 - 24, Conference Center of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Schaumburg, Illinois)
The overall system and system components of Health Care (including its delivery processes, pharmaceuticals and other therapies and preventive measures, medical devices, and its regulatory and economic framework) are challenged to be "agile systems". Agility challenges arise from shifting threats, expectations, and competition, advances in technology and medical science, and evolving economic and regulatory aspects.
Although the software development community has advanced the practice of agile development of software, the system-level opportunities and challenges of agility are much broader than software alone. This conference is about the current landscape, examples of progress in agility for more general systems, and the road ahead. It builds on an earlier conference held in 2015. This two-day conference includes multiple session learning tracks as well as collaboration session opportunities to advance the state of the community. Watch this space for future posting of the detailed schedule of tracks, topics, and sessions.
INCOSE Members can download conference presentations and recordings at INCOSE Connect.
Keynote Presentation
Front Line Lessons in Agile Health Care Systems
COL (Ret) Donald A. Gagliano, MD, MHA
Principal, Global Medical Innovation
Senior Health Systems Engineer, The MITRE Corporation
Commander, 30th Medical Brigade; Theater Surgeon, CJTF-7
Plenary Presentation
Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
Bruce Powell Douglass
Chief Evangelist, Global Technology Ambassador,
IBM IoT
Great Lakes Regional Conference Sep 18-21 – Healthcare track and Healthcare Panel
Local Indian Healthcare WG formed
During APCOSEC2016, the local team in India agreed to form an India Healthcare Working Group. The group will concentrate on improving Systems Engineering for Medical Product development. The initial focus will be on the challenges for value based healthcare products. Founding team members were from Medtronic and Philips Healthcare, and will reach out to several other local companies for additional members. Please contact Vijay Chari (vijay.chari@medtronic.com) or Shailesh Patel (shailesh.s.patil@medtronic.com) for more information or to join the group.
