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Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System

  Articles In This Issue  

There are abundant reasons for the problems in health care delivery.  There are also abundant opportunities for working toward solving these problems.  Engineers may not be able to solve all of them, but the benefits of working toward solutions can be tremendous, and the challenges they present are enormously intellectually stimulating.  Someday, the engineering profession may look back with pride on its contributions to solving this significant social problem.

Articles

  • [Periodical Article]

    Disruptive Innovation in Health Care: Challenges for Engineering

    Innovative, “disruptive” changes in the way health care is organized, paid for, and delivered may lead to a transformation of the overall health care system. Seven years after the publication of two seminal reports by the Institute of Medicine, To Err Is Human (IOM, 2000) and ... Read More

    Author: Jerome H. Grossman

    Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System

    Release date: Spring 2008

    Volume: 38

    Number: 1

  • [Periodical Article]

    New Therapies: The Integration of Engineering and Biological Systems

    Engineering innovation will continue to improve the quality of life and increase life expectancy. In the twentieth century, overall life expectancy increased by 30 years (Figure 1), and young people today can expect to live longer, healthier, more active lives than their great-grandparents, ... Read More

    Author: W. Mark Saltzman

    Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System

    Release date: Spring 2008

    Volume: 38

    Number: 1

  • [Periodical Article]

    Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System (editorial)

    Editor’s Note The suggestion that engineers join in the struggle to improve the health care system almost always elicits surprise, even though engineers have been actively involved in bioengineering and biomaterials engineering for years. In addition, publications on using ... Read More

    Author: W. Dale Compton, Proctor P. Reid

    Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System

    Release date: Spring 2008

    Volume: 38

    Number: 1

  • [Periodical Article]

    Health Care as a Complex Adaptive System: Implications for Design and Management

    Management of complex adaptive systems requires leadership rather than power, incentives and inhibitions rather than command and control. For several years, the National Academies has been engaged in a systemic study of the quality and cost of health care in the United States (IOM, 2000, ... Read More

    Author: William B. Rouse

    Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System

    Release date: Spring 2008

    Volume: 38

    Number: 1

  • [Periodical Article]

    Adapting Process-Improvement Techniques in an Academic Medical Center

    Systemic changes require cooperation between those who deliver care and administrators committed to the public disclosure of outcomes. Academic medical centers, the crown jewels of the medical system, have a tripartite mission. First, of course, as hospitals, they are intimately involved in ... Read More

    Author: Paul F. Levy

    Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System

    Release date: Spring 2008

    Volume: 38

    Number: 1

  • [Periodical Article]

    The Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business: Creating an Adaptive Health Care System

    As biology becomes an information science, health care will learn from nature how to accelerate change. The world of health care lies between the realms of medical science, which continues to deliver new treatments and information at an accelerating rate, and of policy, which is ... Read More

    Author: Christopher Meyer

    Engineering and the Health Care Delivery System

    Release date: Spring 2008

    Volume: 38

    Number: 1