Opportunities to apply systems engineering to healthcare interprofessional education

In medical settings, interprofessional education (IPE) plays an important role by bringing students from multiple disciplines together to learn how to collaborate effectively and coordinate safe patient care. Yet developing effective IPE is complex, considering that stakeholders from different schools and programs are involved, each with varying curriculum requirements and interests. Given its critical importance and inherent complexity, innovative approaches to address these challenges are needed to effectively develop and sustain effective IPE programs. Systems engineering (SE) combines a lifecycle perspective with established interdisciplinary processes to develop and sustain large complex systems. The need for SE approaches to manage healthcare complexity has been recognized, but the application of SE to IPE programs has been limited. We believe that there is a significant opportunity for IPE programs to benefit from the application of SE. The common themes running through SE and IPE led us to ask if SE can be used to address IPE complexity and achieve desired IPE outcomes. We believe that SE could facilitate further development and sustainability of a recently developed healthcare curriculum. We also propose to use SE to accelerate and manage future IPE curriculum development, while better understanding the states of vital IPE-related components. We discuss a framework that considers transitions of key IPE elements. We believe that use of interdisciplinary SE processes and holistic perspectives and methods such as system thinking will improve the management of system challenges while addressing IPE’s inherent complexity and leading to better patient outcomes and more effective interprofessional collaboration

Systems Thinking in Engineering Design: Differences in Expert vs. Novice and Relationship to Personality Traits

Systems thinking is the ability to see the big picture and the related elements when designing, and how these relationships form the big picture. In engineering design, systems thinking is valuable to both industry, as well as engineering education. As such, it creates opportunities for researchers to better understand systems thinking of both professional engineers in industry, who are assumed to be the experts, and engineering students in higher education, who are assumed to be the novices. The purpose of this study was to compare and identify the differences between expert and novice systems thinking in engineering design. Additionally, the study explored the relationship between systems thinking and individual personality. Results from various statistical analysis of 61 teams (18 professionals, 19 seniors, and 24 freshmen) show that professionals are different from senior and freshman students because they focus more on the problem during their systems thinking process, whereas students tend to focus on the solution. Surprisingly, members of professional teams interact less with each other than student teams during the process of breaking down complex problems into smaller and manageable subproblems. The results also showed that there were similarities in systems thinking between professionals and senior students. Additionally, exploratory results from a small subset of the participants show no clear evidence for a relationship between systems thinking and personality traits. Therefore, the existence of the relationship between systems thinking and personality traits remains in question and require further investigation. The findings from this study have several implications for engineering education and future research