First-year students in the MS in Engineering Management (MSEM) program delivered recommendations to their project partners during poster and presentation sessions at Johns Hopkins Hospital on Friday, October 3. Concluding their two-month consulting engagement known as the Patient Safety Collaboration, sixteen teams of students proposed solutions intended to improve the hospital’s systems, processes, and procedures and increase safety and efficiency.
This year’s projects covered a wide variety of challenges from reducing recurring damage to head and neck scopes that result in high repair costs and procedural delays, to streamlining coordination and communication to decrease turnover time in cardiac operating rooms.
MSEM students are uniquely positioned to design novel solutions in the environment Johns Hopkins Hospital provides, says Trevor Mackesey, director of the MSEM program in the Center for Leadership Education.
MSEM Director Trevor Mackesey and students during the poster presentation session at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
“The Patient Safety Collaboration shows our students that the skills they’ve built as engineers—problem solving, systems thinking, and data-driven decision-making—have profound value far beyond traditional engineering settings. Working alongside clinicians and administrators to improve patient care and operational outcomes, they see firsthand how their technical training can drive meaningful change in complex, human-centered environments,” he said.
Morgane Gaucher, an MSEM student in the mechanical engineering technical track, and her team collaborated on a solution to track reprocessing costs in the Central Sterile Processing (CPS) department, which cleans, decontaminates, assembles, and sterilizes all of the hospital’s surgical instruments. Their research focused on the Weinburg unit, one of four units in the CPS department, and the approximately 600,000 instruments it processes each month to estimate a per-set processing cost to help guide future budgeting decisions.
The team spent time observing the Weinberg CSP operations, gathering information on the facility’s assembly and sterilization workflows, interviewing staff at all levels of the unit, and reviewing financial documents.
Since the team only had access to data from June, July, and August of this year, and operations can fluctuate significantly throughout the year, the team could not provide a cost estimate that would accurately illustrate typical operations. Instead, they landed on an alternative solution that considered the overall context of the unit’s operations.
“We opted instead to provide our host with a tool to track and assess trends within the department over time. We also provided recommendations for next steps, including a suggestion to improve workflow efficiency, to better fine-tune the cost analysis framework we developed, and areas for further investigation that may yield subsequent solutions to reduce CSP costs,” Gaucher said.
Another team addressed the issue of high temperatures in certain operating rooms, such as NICUs or burn units. This elevated temperature is clinically necessary to ensure patient safety but creates a difficult work environment for the surgical team, especially when working in sterile gear under surgical lights. The current solution includes a cooling vest that circulates chilled water, but it is tethered to a system that limits mobility and occasionally interferes with procedural flow.
Leah Flores-Cabrera, an MSEM student in the sustainability and leadership technical track and a member of the team, says that their solution needed to increase comfort for medical staff and mobility while also complying with Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Control (HEIC) regulations. Their three-part solution addresses short-term and long-term improvements.
MSEM students at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
“Our immediate action is to optimize implementation of equipment, conducting quarterly cross-departmental check-ins and creating a standard operating procedure to manage proper equipment use. Our short-term solution includes introducing a phase change material (PCM) cooling vest which would allow for a cost savings of $20,000 per vest, and our long-term strategy is to develop a custom vest in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to ensure 100% compliance,” Flores-Cabrera said.
Through this process, MSEM students learn to apply their engineering mindset to a wide range of issues and work with team members from a variety of engineering disciplines, collaborating to consult on real-world challenges. Pam Sheff, CLE Director and Instructor for the course Strategies for Innovation and Growth, where the project originates, says this project is not necessarily about mastering the art of consulting but learning how expansive engineering can be.
“We are not trying to turn our students into healthcare consultants, although some of them find they have a taste for the field. We are showing them how to translate their engineering mindsets—the problem-solving skills they’ve developed over the years—to other challenges. Students learn about the real-world costs involved in keeping patients safe, and they develop innovative engineering solutions to save time, money and often lives,” Sheff said.
Since the Patient Safety Collaboration began in 2015, engineering management students have consulted on hundreds of projects that have contributed to lasting positive changes at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Stacey Marks, who oversees the student interns managing the projects each year, has seen the impact of engineers and clinicians collaborating to improve operations at the hospital.
“The program’s success has generated strong word-of-mouth referrals, with many hosts proposing multiple projects and recommending the Patient Safety Collaboration to colleagues. Having overseen more than 300 projects, we’ve observed that stakeholders are particularly enthusiastic about partnering with engineers,” Marks said.