Student Team Wins National IISE Capstone Award
Marin Clark, Emilia McDougal, Juan Olivia, and Sahaana Rajesh worked with Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital to reduce the time it takes to turn around a room.
Professor Jill Wilson, left, poses with Sahaana Rajesh, Emilia McDougal, and Juan Olivia.A student team from Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences earned the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Outstanding Capstone Senior Design Project Award at the IISE annual conference, held earlier this month in Atlanta.
Marin Clark, Emilia McDougal, Juan Olivia, and Sahaana Rajesh worked with Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago on “SwiftShift: A Front-Loaded Staffing Strategy to Improve Turnaround Time for Discharge Rooms.” By building a simulation model and analyzing staffing schedules, the team produced a strategy to reduce the time to turn around a room by 10 percent, which improves patient care, increases throughput, and increases staff utilization.
The team at Lurie Children’s then piloted and implemented the recommendations of the group, who were advised by assistant professor of instruction Moses Chan. The project was part of the IEMS capstone class Client Project Challenge.
“The student team, Emilia, Juan, Marin, and Sahaana, all did an amazing job,” said Tyler Moon, Lurie Children’s senior system reporting specialist. “They were great to work with. They came prepared to the meetings each week and prepared a validated simulation model which yielded great recommendations.”
The IISE Outstanding Capstone Senior Design Project Award recognizes individual students or teams for practical application of ISE knowledge and skills that result (or will result) in significant impact to an organization.
The Northwestern team was one of 22 invited to Atlanta to compete in the poster contest to reach the last four. The final quartet then presented their results.