Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Health Care Transformation (ERC-HCT)

University Of South Carolina At Columbia, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

Significant issues in U.S. healthcare delivery persist despite advances in medicine, technologies, health policies, regulations, and resources. U.S. has the greatest medical science in the world, that is unable to provide consistent, affordable care for all citizens. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) attributes more than 100,000 deaths a year to preventable medical errors, resulting from system lapses that fail to deliver well-established standards of practice. Quality, safety, and coordination issues suggest that barriers to transforming U.S. healthcare are complex system engineering problems. Efforts to share information across healthcare systems has many unaddressed barriers. This planning grant is driven by a vision of an Engineering Research Center for Health Care Transformation (ERC-HCT) focused on reengineering delivery of healthcare through a multi-pronged approach that integrates information technology, systems engineering, social sciences, medical science, and health informatics. The primary aim is to advance the science for reengineering U.S. health care delivery from today's costly, inconsistent provider-centric system to a better coordinated person-centered care system. This vision, guided by medical professionals, industry partners, and behavioral scientists, will create care improvements and sustainable, scalable integrated delivery models. The Planning Grant will engage partners to develop a common, deeper understanding of barriers and opportunities afforded by today's technologies as a basis for clarifying strategies and shaping the management structure of the proposed Engineering Research Center. This planning grant brings together a diverse team of researchers from the University of South Carolina, Clemson University, Claflin, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, and the PRISMA Health System, to develop a common, deeper understanding of barriers and opportunities afforded by today?s technologies. ERC-HCT will bring together expertise and research that generally functions in silos, eluding significant progress in system-level transformation. While most funded healthcare translational research supports evidence-based medicine, the proposed ERC-HCT fills a gap by addressing healthcare delivery optimization at a system level, a stubbornly intractable challenge. We will focus on advancing the fundamental sciences essential to address four key research thrusts: care coordination, clinical decision support, population health management, and personalized health. Sciences to be addressed include artificial intelligence, data science, biomedicine, health IT, complex system engineering, and human-computer interaction. Research will inform healthcare practice, payment, public policy, and provide a rich innovation ecosystem to prepare future leaders and attract new innovative researchers to partner universities, contributing to sustainability. As stakeholders work toward solutions, we anticipate that their views will coalesce around realistic possibilities and pathways forward for achieving the vision for a better engineered, patient-centered healthcare delivery system. The planning grant activities will focus on engaging these stakeholders to establish leadership, determine a governance structure for the ERC, and develop detailed strategies and action plans to sustain convergence across multiple ongoing research and testbed projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.