Designing Healthcare Solutions Across Silos
Pitt industrial engineering students collaborate with UPMC teams to design real-world solutions to healthcare challenges
Andrey Ibragimov, former vice president of operations for Ambulatory Surgery at UPMC, has long envisioned university students, researchers, medical staff, and faculty of different disciplines sharing unique perspectives to improve healthcare. Yet meaningful engagement across silos always seemed elusive – until this year.
This past spring, Ibragimov and his team partnered with students from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Industrial Engineering to visualize stronger healthcare ecosystems. The senior design capstone project was one of three collaborations between the Swanson School and UPMC. From mapping care ecosystems, to applying human factors to critical-care tools, to building interactive models for capacity planning, these projects highlight how new perspectives can create lasting solutions.
“I was craving that outside view.”
Last fall, Ibragimov read an email about the UPMC-Swanson School partnership, where students applied industrial engineering principles to healthcare challenges. Intrigued, he met with Lisa Maillart, Leighton E. and Mary N. Orr Professor and department chair of industrial engineering, and Scott Streiner, assistant professor of industrial engineering and undergraduate program director, and soon a project came into focus.
Ibragimov and colleague Collin Morrow, director of finance for Community Ambulatory Services, work to “provide an integrated approach between the physician and the hospital side, in everything from the urgent care standpoint, to surgery centers, to outpatient imaging.”
“Our goal,” as Morrow said, “is to build stronger ecosystems across Western Pennsylvania where patients can access convenient care and doctors spend less time traveling.”
They welcomed the outside perspectives of industrial engineering students Brady Fintan, Jordan During, Alan Ghosh, Danny Marren, and Max Rimdzius.
“We provided the team with data of all the appointments surgeons and patients have, and how far they must travel to different locations,” Ibragimov said. “We asked them to document the current state and develop an optimized system based on an ecosystem model that decreased a surgeon’s ‘windshield time’ and that created a better experience for patients.”
The team met in person weekly and, as Morrow noted, “We approached this project by having them serve as consultants and we were the client.”
Every week and then bi-weekly, the students returned with fresh analysis and visualization. What they produced far exceeded expectations: a series of interactive maps highlighting facility types near urgent care centers and the drive time of doctors across the system. They also overlaid the UPMC network on census-based maps to highlight population shifts in and around Pittsburgh.
“We could clearly see how the region is changing and where we have gaps,” Ibragimov said. He and Morrow called the project a “game changer” that could play a vital role in decision making.
“I enjoy programming and solving complicated operational challenges, and this one was unique,” said team member Danny Marren, who noted that the data analysis and visualization skills would carry into his career. “My favorite part was unlocking a whole new view for them.”
“It’s a high-pressure, high-risk, low-frequency event.”
In the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital, two emergency carts hold supplies needed in the unlikely event of opening a patient’s chest to provide immediate life support.
“The carts have been around for over 50 years, and they weren’t designed with a systematic approach that applies human factors elements,” said Holt Murray, medical director of the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital and assistant professor of Critical Care Medicine. The carts are also infrequently used.
“Even our higher-volume procedures, like an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), happen around 90 times a year. When you factor in a nurse’s schedule, working three and a half shifts a week, there is low exposure to them,” he said.
Yet the specialty supplies are extremely time-sensitive, and someone with minimal experience must be able to reach them quickly.
Murray was eager to partner with the Swanson School to rethink how the carts were constructed and organized. “I was delighted to have a bunch of engineers come in and look at our processes.”
Those engineers were Pitt seniors Maya Jain, Cindy Lkhagvasuren, Garrett Rojik, Madelyn Shaw, and Aidan Wolynn. The team visited the hospital and met with Murray, nurse practitioner Lorenza Schwartzmiller, and nurses on the floor. They worked closely with Schwartzmiller, combining physician nursing and engineering to solve a complex problem.
“From the get-go, we understood how high-risk it is,” Jain said.
As they began the redesign, the team ran tests, timing nurses as they pulled equipment from the existing carts. “They could see within a few nurses what the fundamental engineering problem was,” Murray said.
The students inventoried the carts, measuring and weighing all items, and set to work modeling and designing something new. “We really had to understand how all the supplies were used so we could develop the order in our cart,” said Rojik.
“We turned to our visual management techniques. You know, when operators go on the manufacturing floor, they know exactly where their tools are. They have an outline for it and a standard workspace,” Jain added.
The two carts are used for different lifesaving procedures. As the team explored models, they chose to combine both into one larger cart, with each half devoted to a procedure. “We spent hours trying to figure out how we could fit everything into the carts,” Jain said.
After they settled on a design, the students took the project a step further: they built a full prototype. “We were cutting wood and putting it together, sanding, painting, attaching wheels, and labeling everything,” Rojik said. “I liked woodworking in high school, so to get my hands dirty again was great.”
Then they were pushing the cart up the hill to Presbyterian Hospital, where they ran tests again with nurses, this time using their cart. The results reflected success.
“The team did a great job starting from square one,” Murray said. “We’re moving forward with steps to implement them on a large scale.”
“They don’t come in with any preconceived notions.”
Although Audrey Alcorn (ENGR BS ’84) works in healthcare administration at UPMC Shadyside, she’s an industrial engineer, and a Pitt alum. She knows the perspective industrial engineers can bring to healthcare.
“This was my ninth project through the partnership with UPMC and the Swanson School,” said Alcorn, PE and CSP, and innovation improvement specialist at UPMC Shadyside. “Previous projects focused on efficiency, effectiveness, and process improvement. This one was different.”
Adjacent to Shadyside Hospital is the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, recognized worldwide for its treatment. Shadyside provides inpatient cancer care while Hillman delivers outpatient services. “As we continue to bring on highly recognized oncologists, we’re receiving many more patients,” Alcorn said.
With the increase, her team needed to understand how adding physicians and patients would affect capacity and current resources. “It was time to apply an engineering mindset.”
That mindset came from students Andrea Adamski, Camren Corbett, Ava Hartman, Alexis Hong, and Yuankai Zhang. The team received a trove of real operational data and set to work making sense of it.
“In our classes, the data is clean,” said Hong. “For this project, we were working with real data. We had to work around gaps and make assumptions.”
Added Corbett, “The most challenging aspect of the project was cleaning the data so it could be properly modeled.”
The team analyzed oncology patient capacity to understand how increased physician recruitment and patient volume would impact resources. In Microsoft Excel, they created interactive, color-coded tables that let users input hypothetical changes and see immediate results: if a result appears red, they’re over capacity; if it’s green, they have room.
On both the inpatient and outpatient side, the models help administrators understand how facilities are used and provide the data necessary to improve decision making and patient care.
“Everybody’s been blown away,” Alcorn said. “They’re like, ‘wow, wow, wow,’ because it’s different from what they’re used to seeing. The project has helped us see gaps and opportunities to care for more patients.”
The project also impressed judges at the Swanson School’s 23rd Design Expo, where the project won second place in Industrial Engineering.
“Knowing who this project would impact definitely motivated us,” Corbett said.
Indeed, across these projects, students understood the gravity of their work. Each team treated their capstone project like a consulting engagement, meeting regularly with UPMC leaders, testing assumptions against real constraints, and turning engineering analysis into tools that clinicians and administrators can use.
As Ibragimov noted, “This was a great experience, and I’m truly going to miss it.”