William B. "Bill" Rouse, professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and executive director of the university-wide Tennenbaum Institute for Enterprise Transformation (TI), recently published, Engineering the System of Healthcare Delivery, the third volume in the Tennenbaum Institute Series on Enterprise Systems.  

In Engineering the System of Healthcare Delivery, Rouse and co-editor Denis Cortese, former CEO of the Mayo Clinic, together with a team of highly regarded thought leaders, advocate a complete re-thinking of healthcare from a systems perspective – an engineering approach to healthcare – and they then describe how to set about it.

The authors argue that as the United States continues to debate reform of its healthcare system, providing health insurance for all without improving the delivery system will not improve the current problems of access, affordability, and quality. They maintain that the U.S. healthcare system, while having many excellent components, has evolved haphazardly over time.  And although it has not failed entirely, like any system where attention is paid to individual components at the expense of the system as a whole, it can never hope to succeed. Above all, they point out that the U.S. system does not provide high-value healthcare; it has the highest costs in the world, and yet many other countries have lower infant mortality rates and better life expectancy.

Engineering the System of Healthcare Delivery covers a wide range of subjects, including health care costs and economics, barriers to change, integrated health systems, electronic records and computer-based patient support as well as patient safety and palliative and chronic care.

The mission of the Tennenbaum Institute is the creation and dissemination of information, knowledge, and skills to enable fundamental changes of complex organizational systems. The book series on Enterprise Systems is one of the ways TI facilitates the dissemination of knowledge created by its many partners in academia, industry, and government as well as the Institute’s faculty and staff. TI’s research and education addresses a rich mixture of concepts, principle, models, methods, and tools applicable to a wide range of enterprise domains. Two domains of particular emphasis at TI are healthcare delivery and global manufacturing. Research and education in these two domains are enhanced by strong partnerships with leading companies and agencies in these domains, as well as thought leaders from many organizations.