Thirty-one teams from Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) participated in the Spring 2017 Senior Design Capstone Expo. Three of those teams, advised by IPaT’s Julie Swann and Pinar Keskinocak, were chosen as finalists to compete in the ISyE Best of Senior Design on May 3.

CDC Contact Tracing
The CDC Contact Tracing team developed a decision support tool to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identify infected airline passengers during contact tracing investigations. Taking in pathogen and flight parameters, this novel application returns a transmission-risk model and analyzes alternative protocols. The application's versatility enables comprehensive scenario coverage, and its back-end allows for continuous improvement by health authorities nationwide. Adopting the revised protocol anticipates savings up to $300,000 per flight.
 

CDC Smoke
The CDC Smoke team worked with the CDC to support a recent policy by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) where effective February 3rd, 2017, all 1.3 million public housing units must go “smoke-free” within 18 months. They created a targeted approach to smoking cessation by estimating smoking prevalence within the public units, calculating the return-on-investment (ROI) of each cessation intervention at a granular level, and prioritizing recommendations that yield the highest returns. They have developed a tool, EXTINGUISH, that visualizes relevant data in order to help better utilize resources to connect smokers to cessation resources. The values of the project include greater efficiency for health departments, better connections between agencies and cessation resources, and increased support of smokers wanting to quit. With the project, they identified approximately $12 to $582 million dollars in savings (approximately 6 percent to 30 percent in cost reductions) for the stakeholders for different smoking cessation interventions.

Emory Discharge
The Emory Discharge team designed process changes and developed a unique tiered discharge procedure precipitating patient departure time from Emory Midtown Hospital. The team also implemented an expedited taxi arrangement, which indicated the viability of solutions with increased patient uptake throughout the pilot. By facilitating patient flow, solutions are shown to reduce diversion by 2.6 percent, cut boarding times by 30 minutes, and allow Emory to serve 63 more ambulance arrivals per year. Financially, the project yields a $306,000 increase in annual revenue and a $1.1 million net present value, while also increasing patient quality of care.

During the Spring 2017 Capstone Expo, a panel of ISyE alumni judges chose CDC Contact Tracing as one of the winning projects.