Supporting the Spread of Systems Engineering in Healthcare: A Partnership for Teaching Patient Safety Residents

Recent reports indicate that physician graduates do not possess an understanding of systems engineering tools. This is relevant because systems failures in healthcare delivery generate medical errors and avoidable adverse events, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and wasting billions of dollars annually. The Institute of Medicine calls for collaboration across disciplines to spread systems engineering within healthcare; however, few physician educators possess the necessary expertise to teach these methods. In this article, we describe a novel systems engineering and quality improvement training partnership between engineers and practicing clinicians. This curriculum effectively increased knowledge in systems thinking, provided direct experience utilizing improvement tools, and enhanced care delivery. Through coupling the interests and resources of engineering faculty and the residency training program, we were able to build an effective training program that empowers front-line staff to identify and act on systems-based patient safety problems. (C) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.