Improving Student Engagement and Training in Healthcare Engineering

该项目旨在通过开发教学材料来帮助工科学生学习医疗保健工程职业所需的技能，从而为国家利益服务。工程在改善和推进医疗保健系统方面发挥着越来越重要的作用。医疗保健工程（HE）侧重于在医疗保健环境中应用工程概念、方法和技术创新。他认为医疗保健是一个复杂的系统，包括组织、机构、设施、信息系统、管理系统、融资机制、后勤、资源和在一个地理区域内从事提供医疗保健的所有受过培训的人员的完整网络。预计对医疗保健工程师的需求将会增长，这就需要更多关于高等教育主题的工程指导，并努力让学生意识到高等教育的机会，这可能会吸引那些没有考虑过从事工程职业的学生。该项目将通过使用电子数据仓库（EDW）的数字医疗保健工程，吸引和培训工程专业的学生进行医疗保健系统创新。数据仓库用于从复杂的医疗环境中收集和存储大数据，并可用于支持医疗系统创新和卓越运营。此计划旨在为学生提供学习数据分析的机会，使学生能够发展成为医疗保健行业的医疗保健数据分析师所需的技能。将开发教学模块和学生项目，以帮助学生学习如何访问医疗保健数据库、创建数据模型、执行数据分析以及为结果创建可视化。外展活动将在高中和当地社区大学进行，以帮助扩大医疗保健工程的参与。该项目的目标是将医疗保健工程（HE）教育整合到现有的工业和系统工程计划中，并增加新兴HE领域中代表性不足群体的学生的参与度。一个基于项目的学习方法将被实施，以帮助学生学习如何设计和开发医疗系统的决策支持系统，建立医疗系统的计算机模拟模型来评估系统变化的影响，并使用数据挖掘方法来理解医疗系统的行为。将开发一个医疗保健数据分析实验室和技术研讨会系列，以支持学生的学习。该实验室将为学生提供软件和硬件资源，帮助他们成功完成医疗保健系统项目。为了增加高等教育中代表性不足群体的学生人数，该项目将为高中和社区大学的学生提供小型讲习班，并为学生及其家庭举办互动论坛，以提高学生和家庭对工程的认识。本项目将解决的研究问题是：项目活动对代表性不足的西班牙裔学生对当前新兴技术的兴趣以及学生保留率和学位完成进度的影响是什么？将使用前后调查和机构数据来收集参与者的数据，并使用定性和定量方法来分析结果。项目成果将通过在美国工程教育学会年度会议上的演讲和在教育相关期刊上的出版物传播给工程教育界。NSF IUSE: EHR计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过参与学生学习轨道，该计划支持有前途的实践和工具的创建，探索和实施。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing instructional materials to help engineering students learn the necessary skills for careers in healthcare engineering. Engineering is increasingly playing an important role in improving and advancing healthcare systems. Healthcare Engineering (HE) focuses on applying engineering concepts, methods, and technical innovations in a healthcare context. HE views healthcare as a complex system including the complete network of organizations, agencies, facilities, information systems, management systems, financing mechanisms, logistics, resources, and all trained personnel engaged in delivering healthcare within a geographical area. The demand for healthcare engineers is anticipated to grow, creating a need for more instruction in engineering on HE topics as well as efforts to make students aware of opportunities in HE, which could attract students who have not considered an engineering career. This project will engage and train engineering students for healthcare system innovation with digital healthcare engineering using an Electronic Data Warehouse (EDW). An EDW is used to collect and store big data from complex healthcare environments and can be used to support healthcare systems innovation and operational excellence. This project plans to provide students with opportunities to learn about EDWs so that students can develop the necessary skills to become a healthcare data analyst in the healthcare sector. Instructional modules and student projects will be developed to help students learn how to access healthcare databases, create data models, perform data analyses, and create visualizations for the results. Outreach activities will be conducted at high schools and a local community college to help broaden participation in healthcare engineering.The goals of this project are to integrate healthcare engineering (HE) education in an existing industrial and systems engineering program and to increase engagement for students from underrepresented groups in the emerging HE field. A project-based learning approach will be implemented to help students learn how to design and develop decision support systems for healthcare systems, build computer simulation models of healthcare systems to evaluate the impact of system changes, and use data mining methodologies to understand the behavior of healthcare systems. A healthcare data analytics laboratory and technical workshop series will be developed to support student learning. The laboratory will provide students with software and hardware resources that will help them complete their healthcare systems projects successfully. To increase the number of students from underrepresented groups in HE, the project will offer mini-workshops for high school and community college students and hold interactive forums for students and their families to improve student and family perceptions of engineering. The research question that will be addressed in this project is: What is the impact of project activities on student interest in current emerging technologies among underrepresented Hispanic students as well as student retention and progress towards degree completion? Pre- and post surveys and institutional data will be used to collect data on participants and qualitative and quantitative methods will be used to analyze the results. Project results will be disseminated to the engineering education community through presentations at the annual conference of the American Society of Engineering Education and in publications in education related journals. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.