In This Issue
Collaboration and Community at the CHEPS Symposium
News & Events
Where in the World Is CHEPS
Collaboration and Community at the CHEPS Symposium
Ask anyone familiar with the Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety (CHEPS) what makes the Center so special and “people” and “community” are bound to be on that list. Our annual Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety Symposium is a chance to bring that community together to share research and ideas while celebrating the unique collaborative environment CHEPS creates. This year, the Symposium was held on Monday, September 17th in the Robert H. Lurie Engineering Center.
CHEPS student Anna Learis attended the Symposium for the third time this year. Asked what she enjoys most about the event she said, “It’s always the people. It’s so fun to see everyone — all the professors we work with, the clinical collaborators, the donors. It’s just a great environment.”
The celebration starts before Monday’s Symposium. On the Friday evening before the Symposium, current and former CHEPS students along with faculty, staff, and some longtime friends of CHEPS traditionally reunite at Conor O’Neill’s in downtown Ann Arbor. One alumnus in attendance commented that hearing from current students about how the project he’d started years ago had progressed felt like seeing his baby all grown up.
Professor Amy Cohn, Associate Director of CHEPS, said seeing the returning alums is a highlight each year. “One of the best parts of the reunion for me is seeing our alums come home, seeing how they’ve grown and the new experiences they’ve had,” she said. “I’m pleased that they value what they had at CHEPS and that they want to come back and share those new experiences with us. Most of all, I appreciate seeing how generous they are with the younger students in sharing their knowledge and being willing to help and mentor.”
In addition to mentoring, the alumni and current students enjoy just spending the Symposium weekend hanging out together. Some alums and current students attended the football game together on Saturday. They had the chance to watch the University of Michigan win 45 to 20 against Southern Methodist University. CHEPS alum Sarah Bach, who was preparing to run the Chicago Marathon, even did a training run over Symposium weekend with current student Adam Van Deusen.
Just as the reunion has grown each year, so has the Symposium. The Symposium has almost doubled in size from around 80 attendees in 2013 to over 150 attendees this year. What hasn’t changed since 2013 is the fact that the Symposium creates an environment where collaborators and members of CHEPS, past and present, can come together to share ideas and learn about each other’s projects and research.
For Amanda Moreno-Hernandez, Master’s student in Industrial and Operations Engineering, the Symposium was an opportunity to get to know her collaborators and peers and their research better. “This is my first year at CHEPS. I’m very eager to be working with the whole CHEPS team,” she said. “I’m enjoying watching my peers expose what they’re working on because you mention it on a daily basis ‘Oh, I’m working on scheduling.’ But you don’t get to understand what really goes into working on that. Here you get to see the whole process and they get to present it to you.”
Christopher Friese, Elizabeth Tone Hosmer Professor of Nursing, mentioned that the Symposium is now also a time to see how projects have grown. He partnered with CHEPS when their work with the Rogel Cancer Center was just beginning. “We were trying to improve not only the quality and safety but the efficiency of the care we deliver,” he said. “And what a perfect storm then for engineers to come and help us with that. So we started to bring a nursing student, an engineering student, engineering faculty, and myself together to partner with members of the Rogel Cancer Center to see if we could move the needle on this problem and in very short order we were able to find some efficiencies and get the scheduling better. Now, five or six years later, here we are and they’re continuing to improve that work and find other ways to make care safer, higher-quality, more efficient for patients. So how exciting is that.”
Thank you to the entire CHEPS community for making the Symposium so special every year. We hope to see you again next year!
Posters and photos from the Symposium are available on our website and a video is available below.
Recent News
Jeff Fessler Presents in CHEPS Seminar Series, 10/8/18
Sarah Bach Runs Chicago Marathon, 10/7/18
Young-Chae Hong has Paper Published, 10/3/18
Richard Hughes Presents in CHEPS Seminar Series, 10/1/18
Maria E. Mayorga Presents in CHEPS Seminar Series, 9/24/18
2018 Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety Symposium, 9/17/18
2018 CHEPS Alumni Reunion, 9/14/18
Upcoming Events
2018 CHEPS Seminar Series
Mondays, 4:30 – 6:30 pm, 1123 LBME
Full schedule of talks here.
Where in the World is CHEPS
See more Where in the World is CHEPS on our webpage.
Center for Healthcare Engineering & Patient Safety | University of Michigan
[email protected] | cheps.engin.umich.edu
