Improving Student Engagement and Training in Healthcare Engineering

University Of Texas At El Paso, El Paso TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing instructional materials to help engineering students learn the necessary skills for careers in healthcare engineering. Engineering is increasingly playing an important role in improving and advancing healthcare systems. Healthcare Engineering (HE) focuses on applying engineering concepts, methods, and technical innovations in a healthcare context. HE views healthcare as a complex system including the complete network of organizations, agencies, facilities, information systems, management systems, financing mechanisms, logistics, resources, and all trained personnel engaged in delivering healthcare within a geographical area. The demand for healthcare engineers is anticipated to grow, creating a need for more instruction in engineering on HE topics as well as efforts to make students aware of opportunities in HE, which could attract students who have not considered an engineering career. This project will engage and train engineering students for healthcare system innovation with digital healthcare engineering using an Electronic Data Warehouse (EDW). An EDW is used to collect and store big data from complex healthcare environments and can be used to support healthcare systems innovation and operational excellence. This project plans to provide students with opportunities to learn about EDWs so that students can develop the necessary skills to become a healthcare data analyst in the healthcare sector. Instructional modules and student projects will be developed to help students learn how to access healthcare databases, create data models, perform data analyses, and create visualizations for the results. Outreach activities will be conducted at high schools and a local community college to help broaden participation in healthcare engineering. The goals of this project are to integrate healthcare engineering (HE) education in an existing industrial and systems engineering program and to increase engagement for students from underrepresented groups in the emerging HE field. A project-based learning approach will be implemented to help students learn how to design and develop decision support systems for healthcare systems, build computer simulation models of healthcare systems to evaluate the impact of system changes, and use data mining methodologies to understand the behavior of healthcare systems. A healthcare data analytics laboratory and technical workshop series will be developed to support student learning. The laboratory will provide students with software and hardware resources that will help them complete their healthcare systems projects successfully. To increase the number of students from underrepresented groups in HE, the project will offer mini-workshops for high school and community college students and hold interactive forums for students and their families to improve student and family perceptions of engineering. The research question that will be addressed in this project is: What is the impact of project activities on student interest in current emerging technologies among underrepresented Hispanic students as well as student retention and progress towards degree completion? Pre- and post surveys and institutional data will be used to collect data on participants and qualitative and quantitative methods will be used to analyze the results. Project results will be disseminated to the engineering education community through presentations at the annual conference of the American Society of Engineering Education and in publications in education related journals. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.