HSyE Receives $4M Grant

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has funded a collaboration between the Center for Patient Safety, Research, and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and the Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute (HSyE) at Northeastern University to establish a patient safety center focused on integrating healthcare safety, information technology, systems engineering, and human factors expertise. One of five awards nationwide, the Patient Safety Learning Laboratory (PSLL) grant is funded at roughly $1 million annually for four years.

The PSLL center will be led by Principal Investigator David Bates, MD, MSc (Senior Vice President for Quality and Safety, BWH) and Co-PI James Benneyan, PhD (Executive Director, HSyE) and focuses on developing tools to engage patients, family, and professional care team members in reliable identification, assessment, and reduction of patient safety threats in real-time before they manifest in actual harm. The PSLL will establish a vibrant learning ecosystem of health services, informatics, and systems engineering researchers collaborating with patients and family to evolve and apply these approaches to adverse event prevention in hospitalized patients. As a result of increased implementation and use of health information technology (HIT) and patient/family engagement in their plan of care, PSLL projects will provide information, strategies, and tools for utilizing HIT to facilitate patient activation in eliminating harm in hospital settings.

Northeastern University’s Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute is a university-wide institute focused on broadly impacting healthcare through the integration of research, application, and education in systems engineering methods. The Institute houses four federally-awarded healthcare industrial engineering centers, coop and summer internship programs, and a post-doctoral development program, with core funding from the National Science Foundation, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, National Institutes of Health, Veterans Health Administration, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The Center for Patient Safety, Research, and Practice, based at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Harvard Medical School, is a multi-institutional organization that works to improve patient safety in all healthcare settings through scientifically proven systems, methods, and practices. Established to understand how mistakes occur and what systems are needed to prevent them, the Center is led by David Westfall Bates, MD, MSc, Senior Vice President for Quality and Safety and Chief Quality Officer for the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Physicians Organization.

For further information, contact James C. Benneyan, PhD, Executive Director, Northeastern University Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute at j.benneyan@neu.edu.

Related Faculty: James Benneyan

Related Departments:Mechanical & Industrial Engineering