LSU Industrial Engineering Students Join Forces With EMS
BATON ROUGE – Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, especially in a
busy field such as emergency medicine. For this reason, the East Baton Rouge Parish
Department of Emergency Medical Services has partnered with LSU Industrial Engineering
students to come up with innovative ideas and observations that not only help EMS,
but also give the students invaluable experience.
The symbiotic relationship between LSU’s IE department and EMS began in 2011, when EMS Medical Director Dr. Dan Godbee reached out to then-IE Department Chair Craig Harvey to propose working together on a few projects. Godbee, who was a staff doctor at Earl K. Long Medical Center, wanted to “bring the two worlds of my life together—my previous engineering career and my current medical career,” he said.
Godbee, who holds a Master of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering, said he looked at the LSU Mechanical & Industrial Engineering website and saw Harvey was a fellow Georgia Tech alumnus.
“He came in and had discussions with us on how we could work together,” said Harvey, now associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Engineering. “He had ideas, then we generated ideas together that the students could work on.”
“We both went into this and got more than we ever bargained for,” Godbee said.
After Earl K. Long closed its doors in 2013, Godbee joined EMS and continued the relationship with LSU’s IE department. Since then, two groups of three IE students work on EMS projects each semester as part of their senior design, or capstone, course. During the first semester, EMS gives them a project for which they must produce an implementation plan. In the second semester, the students attempt to implement what they suggested and determine how well it worked.
“What we tell the students when they get oriented with us is that there will be an obstacle at some point where you think it’s insurmountable and we’re all going to have to readjust,” Godbee said. “That’s life, right? The other one is, and this is where we get the best input, is something you had no idea you were looking for will pop up a month or two into the project and you realize, wow, this is what we really want to take a look at that wasn’t even considered in the original project. You didn’t even know about it. When we thought we were looking for A, what we really need to do is look at B.”
One project in particular made a significant impact on EMS in 2015. EMS wanted to add ambulance resources and possibly build another station. A senior design team working on the project concluded that EMS did not, in fact, need another station. This led to another project by an IE graduate student of Harvey's, Allison Dupont, who confirmed the team's findings and concluded that simply adding ambulances to existing stations would reduce the travel time.
“I used geographic information systems (GIS) and discrete event simulation to create maps and aggregate demand data on arrival, based on when calls were made into the station, so we could see what areas had the most calls, what [were the] level of calls, and what hospital they went to,” said Dupont, a native of New Orleans.
Based on her geology and mapping skills, which she acquired while working on her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and geology at Bowdoin College in Maine and subsequently working as an environmental scientist at Shaw Coastal in Baton Rouge, Dupont concluded that it would not be in EMS’ best interest to build a new station.
“The analysis she did helped EMS realize they did not need a new station and all of the costs involved with that,” said LSU IE Program Director Isabelina Nahmens.
“To this day, we use that as an example for current students,” Godbee said. “The diagram literally changed where we were going to put an EMS station, which is a huge deal.”
Dupont, who now works in Chicago as a health consultant for Navigant Consulting, still keeps in touch with LSU’s IE department and Harvey in case there are any students who need advice on getting into healthcare consulting.
“This project definitely helped me get my job,” she said. “Working with EMS was really great and also having the support of the IE department to come up with this idea and run with it and try out new solutions,” Dupont said.
Another project had students do a workflow analysis in the emergency department.
“I’ll never forget this because it was an eye-opener,” Godbee said.
The students charted how much time the ER staff spent on certain tasks, showing where most of their time was spent. The results were shocking to everyone in the ER, including Godbee himself.
“Across the board, everyone said writing something down, documenting and charting,” Godbee said. “The actual answer was talking on the phone to someone in the hospital. No one believed me, so I had to show them the data. It illustrates that, one, we’re not capable of objectively observing ourselves; and two, it shows psychologically that what we think we’re doing the most is something we find burdensome. So, it’s very much time distortion. I spend five minutes documenting something, and I swear it’s half an hour.”
Many projects lead to “spin-off” projects, such as Dupont’s research leading to the production of maps that show different characteristics of 911 calls based on geographic location. Godbee now requires students who have completed their capstone project to recommend another project idea based off of their initial research.
“I’ll ask the students that are ending their second semester, ‘what is the next step?’, and that’s how we get a lot of ideas to throw at them,” Godbee said.
“What happens is a senior design or capstone project could evolve into a master’s thesis or PhD dissertation, so we try to build upon that,” Nahmens said. “Dan has a running list of projects we get to use for the capstone. So, we’ll meet with Dan and scope out the project. He might have an idea, but it might be something that’s more at a graduate level. We try to help them based on the needs of that project.”
“What’s good about the students is they are doing exactly what they should be doing as industrial engineers,” Godbee said. “They don’t know how to be a paramedic, which is good, because they can be completely objective. We can’t look at ourselves doing our job. When you have an external observer look at you, they’ll end up telling you don’t need to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”
Godbee says every year, each group of students gives EMS pertinent information.
“It may be large, it may be small, but every one of them gives us something worth looking at,” he said. “The impact the LSU IE students have had on EMS is tremendous.”
The impact it has had on the IE students is instrumental as well, given that a small percentage of IE graduates will actually go on to work in the healthcare field as consultants.
“One of the differences between EMS projects and other projects is the longstanding relationship LSU has with EMS, not only for senior design, but research-wise,” Nahmens said. “The students really like it because they have access to different things and are open to trying different things. Sometimes when they can’t fully implement something, at least they are allowed to mark it up or simulate it, so they see it has an impact.”
Like us on Facebook (@lsuengineering) or follow us on Twitter and Instagram (@lsuengineering).
###
Contact: Libby Haydel
Communications Specialist
225-578-4840