Faculty at two of Indiana’s leading business schools at Indiana and Purdue universities are collaborating on a project with IU Health to help the healthcare provider manage the COVID-19 demand surge in their 16 hospitals across five regions of the state.
The interdisciplinary team of professors at Purdue’s Krannert School of Management and IU’s Kelley School of Business began working in late March to develop a predictive model of the resources required for an adequate response to the pandemic. This includes both disease prediction and patient flow workload.
Pengyi Shi, assistant professor of supply chain and operations management at Krannert, led the patient-flow workload team. Her research focuses on building data-driven, analytical methods to support decision-making under uncertainty in various healthcare systems. More [link to story 1]
The coronavirus crisis has illuminated how poorly the United States compares with other major industrialized nations in providing workers across all industries with equal access to paid sick and family leave, employee requested flexible scheduling, and reasonable work hours.
Ellen Ernst Kossek, Purdue’s Basil S. Turner Professor of Management, is the coauthor of “The coronavirus & work–life inequality: Three evidence-based initiatives to update U.S. work–life employment policies,” which was recently published in a special issue of Behavioral Science & Policy.
“We propose three national initiatives that would improve U.S. work–life policy: ensure employees have access to and the ability to use paid sick leave and family leave, mandate that employers create emergency backup staffing infrastructures, and give employees the right to request flexible and reasonable work hours,” she says. “These policies would benefit employers, employees, and society as a whole.”
Purdue’s plans to open the campus for in-person instruction last fall included looking for student volunteers to make an impact and continue to develop and build their professional networks.
ProjectX Safe Campus was a virtual five-week consulting internship that allowed student teams to work on solutions to make for a meaningful and safe on-campus experience. It emanated from the Safe Campus Task Force and the Protect Purdue implementation team, groups convened by Purdue University President Mitch Daniels to prepare the university for a fall return to campus.
Students from across campus were eligible to sign up as individuals or in teams of two to four students, with a recommendation that at least one team participant is earning a major or minor from the Krannert School of Management.
Manufacturing will look strikingly different in the post-pandemic era, says a Purdue University expert in supply chain and manufacturing management.
“But we’re really bullish on the future of manufacturing,” says Ananth Iyer, senior associate dean in the Krannert School of Management and director of the Dauch Center for the Management of Manufacturing Enterprises (DCMME). “We want manufacturers everywhere to come out swinging because that’s the only way the supply chain will ramp back up. And we actually think that, however bad the pandemic gets, there is a bright future.”
Iyer is the lead author of a recent working paper that lays out a framework for recovery based on surveys of senior management personnel at about 50 manufacturers in Indiana. Results from the surveys show that rigorous infection control, social distancing enforcement and technology expansion will be the new normal for manufacturers that are managing through the pandemic, weathering shutdowns and restarting operations. More [link to story 2]
Rachel Svetanoff (MBA ’18) serves as a consultant for Johnson & Johnson's Global Public Health department, working with the CaringCrowd team, a fundraising platform that helps nonprofits achieve their global health goals. Among these nonprofits is JB Dondolo Inc., which was founded with the mission of removing barriers that underserved and impoverished communities face to accessing basic needs.
In addition to her role on the board of directors, Svetanoff helped lead JB Dondolo’s 2020 “Music for Water” competition, an annual fundraising campaign open to amateur and professional musicians that will benefit the Navajo Nation and other underrepresented communities that need access to clean water to protect themselves from COVID-19.
“The Navajo Nation experiences some of the highest rates of water poverty in the United States,” Svetanoff says. “Not having indoor plumbing, clean water or sanitation in their homes makes it impossible for them to follow hand-washing guidelines to slow transmission of the virus. When people haul water to their homes, whether from stores and/or watering sites, they are still exposing themselves to others.”
Faculty at two of Indiana’s leading business schools at Indiana and Purdue universities are collaborating on a project with IU Health to help the healthcare provider manage the COVID-19 demand surge in their 16 hospitals across five regions of the state.
The interdisciplinary team of professors at Purdue’s Krannert School of Management and IU’s Kelley School of Business began working in late March to develop a predictive model of the resources required for an adequate response to the pandemic. This includes both disease prediction and patient flow workload.
Pengyi Shi, assistant professor of supply chain and operations management at Krannert, led the patient-flow workload team.
“In my role, I led a team to develop a model of how COVID-19 patients move around the hospital and what resources they use during their stay, such as medical/surgical and ICU beds, ventilators and ECMOs, nurse staff, and PPE,” says Shi. “I developed a model based on a queueing network and programmed it in Excel with easily modifiable parameters for practitioners to evaluate different potential scenarios and operational interventions.”
Shi’s research focuses on building data-driven, analytical methods to support decision-making under uncertainty in various healthcare systems. Her most recent publication, “Timing it Right: Balancing Inpatient Congestion versus Readmission Risk at Discharge,” won the Pierskalla Best Paper Award at the 2018 meeting of the INFORMS Health Applications Society. It is forthcoming in the journal Operations Research.
Another of the team’s co-leaders, Jonathan Helm, associate professor of operations and decision technologies and Grant Thornton Scholar at Kelley, says many models for COVID-19 lack the details needed for hospitals to do operational planning.
“A lot of models out there that predict the number of ICUs and ventilators you’re going to need really are back of the envelope calculations,” Helm says. “For example, patient resource requirements in Indianapolis look different from those for patients in Lafayette and Bloomington. These regions have different types of hospitals and different demographics of people they serve, and different population densities, all of which contribute to COVID-19 care resource requirements.
“We are creating a learning model of how the patients in each region of Indiana are being affected and how they differ from those in the national model,” Helm says.
Helm and four others in Kelley’s Department of Operations and Decision Technologies developed a SEIR disease progression model, which aims to predict when surges of COVID-19 patients might take place around the state.
Combining this with Shi’s workload model has allowed IU Health to predict the impact of operational measures potentially activated as part of a COVID-19 surge plan. Examples include cancelling elective surgeries, transforming ambulatory surgery rooms into ICUs, modifying staff plans and schedules, leveraging the flexible “float” nurse pool to move nurses to where staff is most needed, shipping ventilators between regions, preparing for pharmacy loads, and potentially setting up temporary hospitals.
“The rapid adjustments that have been made throughout the IU Health system in order to accommodate patient surge have been nothing short of astonishing”
The team worked day and night due to the urgency of the situation and is now providing weekly updates to IU Health as the model is able to learn and improve from the evolving new data about COVID-19 patients.
The team also is exploring the possibility of having the tool deployed statewide beyond IU Health.
“I’m excited about the opportunity to use my research in patient flow modeling to help hospitals in their operational response to this highly disruptive pandemic,” Shi says. “The involvement of Purdue and Krannert in this project provides recognition for the school and the university as key players in the solution to this unprecedented outbreak.”
“This effort shows the incredible talent and hardworking nature of our faculty,” says Idalene “Idie” Kesner, dean of the Kelley School and the Frank P. Popoff Chair of Strategic Management. “It also shows how Hoosiers come together from across the state for the benefit of the Indiana community.”
David Hummels, the Dr. Samuel R. Allen Dean of the Krannert School, serves on the board for the IU Health West Central Region. He praised the effort and collaborative approach by Shi and those at Kelley.
“The rapid adjustments that have been made throughout the IU Health system in order to accommodate patient surge have been nothing short of astonishing,” he says. “This is one of the times where they have to try many new things, very quickly, and put an enormous amount of trust in expertise that new systems are going to work.”
Dr. Jose Azar, chief quality officer at IU Health, says the predictive models have helped the healthcare provider anticipate the time and magnitude of the surge and place strategies to meet the anticipated demand on space, staff and resources for the crisis.
“We are diligently monitoring how new cases are evolving,” Shi says. “We just need to be prepared.”
“My primary concern has been to avoid getting to the point where we don’t have enough equipment to keep our staff safe or don’t have enough resources to care for our patients,” he says. “The predictive model has helped us prepare for both scenarios.”
Based upon IU Health’s actual data during the pandemic, the predictive model also will assist in its financial planning. “The great part about the tool is the ability to model when and at what level elective procedures will begin,” says Scott Black, chief financial officer of system clinical services at IU Health. “Those assumptions will allow us to make more informed financial results and cash flow projections.”
“Having an analytical partner help us determine when and where we needed to align people, processes, medication, and supplies in a way that allowed us to minimize medication shortages and rework was valuable in focusing our energy on delivering clinical and operational outcomes,” adds Buck Sanders, vice president and chief pharmacy officer at IU Heath. “We truly appreciate the partnership in helping us fulfill our promise.”
The team is not slowing its efforts as subsequent waves of the virus build across the state. “We are diligently monitoring how new cases are evolving,” Shi says. “We just need to be prepared.”
Manufacturing will look strikingly different in the post-pandemic era, says a Purdue University expert in supply chain and manufacturing management.
“But we’re really bullish on the future of manufacturing,” says Ananth Iyer, senior associate dean in the Krannert School of Management and director of the Dauch Center for the Management of Manufacturing Enterprises (DCMME). “We want manufacturers everywhere to come out swinging because that’s the only way the supply chain will ramp back up. And we actually think that, however bad the pandemic gets, there is a bright future.”
Iyer is the lead author of a recent working paper that lays out a framework for recovery based on surveys of senior management personnel at about 50 manufacturers in Indiana. Coauthors include Steve Dunlop, DCMME’s managing director, as well as Angus McLeod and Roy Vasher, who are both affiliated with the center.
Results from the survey show that rigorous infection control, social distancing enforcement and technology expansion will be the new normal for manufacturers that are managing through the pandemic, weathering shutdowns and restarting operations.
“We want manufacturers everywhere to come out swinging because that’s the only way the supply chain will ramp back up. And we actually think that, however bad the pandemic gets, there is a bright future.”
Many manufacturers are now considering COVID-19 as they map out their operations to optimize labor processes and the flow of materials, a practice called value stream mapping. By including the virus in this thought process, producers say, they are mitigating the chance of their workers becoming infected.
“Without a good map of your processes, where the workstations are, and what people are doing, you really don’t have a good way to systematically understand what the health risks are for this infection,” Vasher says. “You have to know how many people are standing within six feet, how many people are touching a surface and how many people are handling the same tools. Without understanding these risks, then you don’t know what mitigation to apply.”
To address health risks, manufacturers are requiring employees to wear gloves, cleaning and disinfecting tools, and spacing workstations six feet apart by outlining squares or circles on factory floors. They also are adjusting the number of employees per shift, increasing the number of shifts per day, and staggering the start time of shifts to eliminate the chance of workers coming into close contact with each other.
Instituting these infection control and social distancing measures will increase labor costs, as companies will have to track their workers more closely, run smaller shifts and ramp up their cleaning protocols. This will lower the threshold for businesses to adopt new technologies that ease these processes and increase production.
“Given that is the case, it is absolutely the right time to think about adopting technology because what was not justifiable before becomes justifiable now,” Iyer says. “Technology providers will further decrease costs with increased adoption, so even smaller companies should really be thinking about this.”
Ford, for example, is testing wristbands that sense and alert workers when they are within six feet of someone else. And there are likely more innovations on the horizon, Iyer adds.
“These days, for counting and checking inventory, drones have become common. Co-bots can help complete tasks that require two people, and cleaning robots are becoming commonplace for manufacturers,” he says. “Fast adoption of lots of new technologies could be the way that companies can both protect their employees while continuing to produce and adhere to their new processes.”
