9/4/2018 Doug Peterson
New ISE assistant professor studies practical decision-making and communication problems in healthcare settings.
Written by Doug Peterson
Wooldridge worked for three years at an eye hospital in Florida, where she managed decision support and surgical scheduling. And she recalls the day that patients showed up for surgery after prepping the day before, only to discover that the operating room was unavailable. A critical piece of machinery was being repaired, but their system didn’t have a usable or useful way for nurses to report this problem.
The result was unhappy patients and frustrated staff.
“These kinds of incidents got me interested in the communication and coordination of medical teams,” says Wooldridge, who completed her PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She came on board this fall as a new assistant professor in the University of Illinois Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering.
At Wisconsin, Wooldridge studied team cognition in pediatric trauma care processes—looking at how nurses, physicians, and others work as a team in transferring patients from one location to another.
Traditionally, she says, when a patient needs to be transferred from one part of the hospital to another—such as from an operating room to an intensive care unit—the OR nurses will communicate with the ICU nurses, the surgeon will communicate with the ICU doctor, and so on. Each person on the team communicates separately with his or her counterpart.
“However, there has been a shift in health care toward more team-based care,” Wooldridge notes. With a team-based transition, the nursing and physician teams from the OR and ICU meet all together.
“Getting everyone together for a transition means everyone can communicate together, hear answers to each other’s questions, and ask their own questions. So that’s good,” she says. But like anything, her research has found pluses and minuses. It may be difficult to coordinate a time when two entire teams can come together. In addition, a larger team meeting can consume more time than a separate contact.
Wooldridge has been comparing the team-based transition approach being used in a pediatric ICU with the more traditional approach in a unit for adult trauma patients. Her preliminary results show, overall, that the team approach can improve patient safety, quality of care, and worker satisfaction.
Wooldridge grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where her father works as an engineer and her mother is a registered dietician. Wooldridge excelled in math and science in high school and wanted to solve problems that impacted people’s daily lives. So she decided to merge her mother’s healthcare work with her father’s engineering.
“Health care is the one thing that every single person is going to need at some point in their life,” she says. “We’re all going to get sick, so if we can figure out a way to make health care better, we can touch everyone’s lives.”
Wooldridge also has a passion for working with the most vulnerable populations—children and older adults. But once again she witnessed how communication breakdowns can affect such patients.
One older patient showed up for surgery at their hospital, only for the staff to discover that the paperwork giving consent for treatment was not signed. This elderly patient was not able to give her own consent for surgery, and the staff could not find a person of authority to sign the papers.
“That was a very challenging situation,” Wooldridge says. “Again, it was about communication and coordination.”
Wooldridge says she is excited to come to U of I, where she will be part of one of the top-ranked engineering colleges in the country. What’s more, the University of Illinois and Carle Hospital have come together to form the new Carle Illinois College of Medicine, which puts a special emphasis on engineering for health-care solutions.
“I will need clinician collaborators for my research, and they’re here,” she says. “I’m interested in improving system outcomes, which means improving patient safety, quality of care, and worker outcomes.”
The people she has met on the Illinois campus “have been fantastic,” she adds, and she looks forward to tapping into resources such as the Health Care Engineering Systems Center and the Jump Simulation center for health-related research. She also says there is “great work going on at Illinois with the aging population. There’s a lot of synergy on campus for me.”
In the past, she was involved in programs that support diversity in engineering, and she also plans to continue this theme at Illinois. At the University of Louisville, where she completed her bachelor’s and first master’s degrees, she was thrilled whenever she could be a STEM role model for young girls. In one case in college, she had a chance to talk about her work in engineering to kids at over 70 different Kentucky Derby Festival events in a two-week period, when she was named a Derby princess.
Wooldridge has a horse named Dezi, which is stabled back home in Louisville. But when she comes to campus, she plans to do a lot of bicycling because “you don’t have to feed a bike every day.”
Her primary goal at Illinois will be finding “innovative, imaginative, and enduring solutions in engineering. Any time you design and implement new technology, you have to understand the work being done and the tasks happening.”
Electronic health records are an example of new technology that actually increased clinicians’ workload, leading to stress and burnout, she says. Electronic health records were mandated because they were thought to have obvious advantages, such as being legible and centralized, but studies have found that they haven’t fit the clinicians’ typical workflow. Many professionals have to complete record-keeping when they return home after a full eight- or nine-hour day.
“A good engineer has to work in collaboration with clinicians and computer scientists in a participatory design process,” she says. “And if it’s not quite working in simulations and pilot testing, you respond. You refine. Then you implement it in a thoughtful, careful way.”