Seminar by Sudeep Hegde

A Resilience Engineering Approach Toward Improving Quality & Safety in Health Care

Sudeep Hegde

Postdoctoral Researcher

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Harvard Medical School 

The presentation will give an overview of studies from my doctoral and postdoctoral works, which explore Resilience Engineering (RE) approaches in the domain of healthcare. My doctoral work comprises the development of a knowledge elicitation technique and an organizational learning tool, both designed to capture information about ‘what goes well’ in terms of delivering safe and effective care in everyday clinical work. My postdoctoral research includes studying the work of operating room (OR) floor managers (FMs). FMs are the ‘command-and-control’ nodes of the OR floor, managing the schedule and coordinating resources between multiple ORs simultaneously. The study employs an RE-framework to study evolved strategies and the trade-off decisions made by FMs between conflicting goals of safety, efficiency, and optimal workload. Implications for future research in RE, patient safety, and complex systems in general, will be discussed.

Sudeep Hegde is a postdoctoral researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. Sudeep holds a Ph.D. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from the University at Buffalo – State University of New York (SUNY). His research interests are in developing proactive ways to learn about human adaptive performance in complex sociotechnical systems, and translating those insights into effective design of technology, processes, policies, and their inherent interactions. His research has spanned multiple domains including healthcare, intelligence analysis, and knowledge representation. Sudeep’s teaching experience includes a course on Design of Experiments, and lectures on Resilience Engineering for engineering students and medical residents.