Improving Healthcare Access
HSYE DIRECTOR JAMES BENNEYAN APPOINTED TO INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE COMMITTEE TO ADDRESS IMPROVING ACCESS TO U.S. HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS
Dr. James Benneyan, executive director and senior scientist of Northeastern University’s Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute, has been appointed to an Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee to address systemic excessive access and scheduling delays across the VA and U.S. healthcare systems. The new IOM committee, Optimizing Scheduling in Health Care, will outline best practices, relevant measurement approaches, and systems engineering recommendations to improve healthcare access and appointment scheduling in U.S. public and private healthcare systems. A nationally recognized expert in healthcare systems engineering, Benneyan has served on five previous IOM, National Academy of Engineers (NAE), and National Science Foundation committees to define the role of systems engineering in health care, including seminal 2004 and 2011 IOM-NAE joint publications that were the basis for the Veterans Health Administration establishing four engineering centers and outlined systems engineering recommendations to traumatic brain injury for the military health system.
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary set of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze, design, manage, and measure complex systems in order to improve its efficiency, reliability, productivity, quality, and safety. Benneyan previously was senior systems engineer at Harvard Community Health Plan, is an elected fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and in 2012 was awarded an $8 million Healthcare Innovation Challenge Award from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to significantly grow the impact of systems engineering on improving health care. Benneyan recently briefed the IOM and the President’s Council on Science and Technology (PCAST) on this initiative’s progress to-date, as part of PCAST’s June 2014 report and workforce recommendations to President Barack Obama, “Better Health Care and Lower Costs: Accelerating Improvement Through Systems Engineering”.
The Institute of Medicine is the healthcare arm of the National Academy of Sciences, chartered by an 1863 congressional act under President Lincoln to “meet the government's urgent needs for an independent adviser on scientific matters”. Northeastern University’s Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute (HSyE) is a university-wide academic institute focused on broadly impacting healthcare through the integration of research, application, and education in systems engineering methods. The Institute houses four federally-awarded healthcare industrial and systems engineering centers, two coop and summer intern fellowship programs, and a post-doctoral development program, with core funding from the National Science Foundation, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, National Institutes of Health, Veterans Health Administration, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and health system partners.
For further information, please contact Sarah Benson, Events & Communications Coordinator in Northeastern University’s Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute, at s.benson@neu.edu.