3/30/2026
An Illinois ISE alum traces her journey from optimizing hospital scheduling as a graduate student to shaping medical device data standards at the FDA and beyond — showing students how systems engineering can drive meaningful change across an entire healthcare ecosystem.
Written by
Healthcare runs on systems most people never see — data moving between devices and hospitals and decisions that shape patient outcomes every day. For Illinois ISE alum, Terrie Reed (MS IE '82) learning to understand and improve those systems started in the classroom and grew into a career reshaping healthcare at a national and global scale.
Terrie's foundation was built under the mentorship of Professor Judith Liebman, one of the university's first female engineering professors. "Her leadership inspired me to believe there were no limits to what I could achieve with my ISE degree," she says. At a time when U.S. healthcare was shifting from fee-for-service models toward DRGs, HMOs, and PPOs, Liebman saw a clear role for industrial engineering — and pointed her student toward it. The result was a master's thesis optimizing radiology scheduling at what is now OSF Sacred Heart Medical Center in Urbana.
Her early career began in manufacturing, where a chance to tackle a health problem changed her trajectory. By working directly with employees to improve processes, she helped drive down carpal tunnel syndrome rates. The experience was clarifying: "This helped me realize my calling of applying systems engineering to healthcare."
She spent the next 13 years at St. Vincent Indianapolis, applying systems thinking across management engineering, IT and information systems. Working alongside one of the few industrial engineers in hospital settings at the time, she saw firsthand how engineering principles could transform healthcare delivery.
That foundation carried her to the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, where she spent more than two decades advancing data standards for medical device safety. As Associate Director of Informatics and later Senior Advisor for UDI Adoption, she coordinated across government agencies, industry, standards bodies, and health systems to implement Unique Device Identification (UDI) in national and international policy. She also led the team that built AccessGUDID, now a public, authoritative source of medical device data used across the healthcare ecosystem.
The work taught her that systems-level change is fundamentally collaborative. "I learned I was much more impactful finding people with different experiences and backgrounds to help accomplish program goals," she says. Equally important was communication: "I learned that I couldn’t assume people understood the innovation we were bringing, so it was our responsibility to communicate and educate to help others see what was possible." Today, as Chief Strategy Officer at Symmetric Health Solutions, she leads development of AI- and machine learning-driven tools that help more than 1,500 hospitals manage medical device data —replacing manual processes with structured, standardized information drawn from thousands of sources.
For ISE students drawn to healthcare and data, Reed offers this advice: follow your curiosity, build your network and stay open. "The healthcare ecosystem relies on complex data systems — there are so many opportunities, it will be hard to make a decision about your first job. The goal is to expose yourself to people and areas that are interesting and exciting to you. Also know that your first job will not be your last and that one job can build upon another — you have a lifetime to have a fulfilling and impactful career."