Jenna L. Marquard, Ph.D. - US grants

This Broadening Participation Research Initiation Grants in Engineering (BRIGE) grant provides funding to design and evaluate visualizations that will allow health care decision makers, including policy makers and hospital administrators, to understand how health care workers and patients complete health care processes. Decision makers will be able to use the visualizations to make better choices about how to improve the health care processes, thereby increasing process efficiency and reducing process-related medical errors. The researcher will design visualizations using existing process data from two studies. In the first study, researchers used eye-tracking technology to document how health care workers verified a patient's identity, with and without barcoding technology. In the second study, researchers observed the surgery process, wherein some surgeons were sleep deprived. The researcher will evaluate decision makers' attention allocation, interpretation of information, and use of information when making process improvement choices based on 1) summary statistics and charts, 2) complex numerical information, and 3) varying forms of the visualizations.

If successful, the results of this research will improve health care decision makers' abilities to redesign health care processes. By fine-tuning the design of the process visualizations, they will be able to analyze and improve more health care processes in less time. By empirically evaluating how they use the visualizations, the research will ensure that the visualizations are easy to understand and useful to the decision makers. This approach is scalable and lends itself to visualizing processes in non-health care domains.

The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to model physicians' and patients' cognitive and behavioral interactions with health information technology (IT) as these individuals deal with two costly chronic diseases - diabetes and hypertension. The researcher will model these interactions using methods from applied psychology, visualization, and computer science. Using these models, the researcher will assess the quality of physicians' and patients' cognitive and behavioral interactions across existing commercial health IT systems, and will design new computer interfaces that improve how physicians and patients interact with health IT.

By providing guidance for the effective design of health IT, this research will directly support current government initiatives aimed at stimulating the adoption of health IT. There is overwhelming evidence that health IT failures often result from a faulty understanding of how individuals use information while completing tasks and making decisions. This research aims to increase physicians' and patients' adoption of health IT by making it easier for them to find and use the right information at the right time. As chronic disease management poses a significant burden on the healthcare system, the specific design guidance identified via the proposed research has the potential to improve clinical outcomes and reduce the costs of managing these patients. Through this research, PhD students will be able to work closely with healthcare provider mentors and participate in interdisciplinary research teams with physicians, nurses, and computer scientists. Additionally, the researcher will develop realistic case studies to expose undergraduate and graduate students to the growing field of health systems engineering.

The research objective of this Advancing Health Services through System Modeling Research project is to develop and evaluate health information technology (IT) interfaces that can be used to guide healthcare providers in real-time as they complete the complex, error-prone blood transfusion process. The researchers will determine how the interfaces should be designed to best help individuals complete the process safely, and to effectively alert and guide individuals when process failures or exceptional situations arise. The researchers will develop and evaluate these interfaces using laboratory-based evaluations and experiments in a realistic clinical setting. This project will establish foundational principles for the design of real-time health IT-based process guidance systems that improve healthcare process safety and efficiency.

While health IT has the potential to guide individuals completing complex healthcare processes, it is often inflexible, forcing individuals to perform non-ideal, inefficient, and potentially unsafe processes. This project has the potential to dramatically reduce medical errors by designing health IT interfaces that allow individuals flexibility in the way they complete processes, yet provide enough guidance to maintain a high level of process safety. While this project focuses on the blood transfusion process, the fundamental findings will be generalizable to other complex healthcare processes. Through this project, graduate and undergraduate students will be trained by an interdisciplinary team of engineering, computer science, and nursing faculty members. The process guidance system and interfaces developed and evaluated through this project will be integrated into clinical simulation laboratory exercises used in the university?s nursing education curriculum.

The scholarship program in the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will increase the number of community college students with demonstrated academic talent and financial need who transfer, complete baccalaureate degrees in engineering, and enter the STEM workforce. The project will begin with the recruitment of a group of 22 new community college transfer students. The selected students, to be known as S-STEM Scholars, will receive up to $6,000 per year in scholarships and participate in a comprehensive program of academic, professional and personal support. Nearly half of the students who earn baccalaureate degrees in science and engineering in the US complete part of their education at a community college. Programs designed to support community college students to transition to, and graduate from, four-year engineering programs will increase the number of engineering graduates entering the workforce. Scholarships for academically strong engineering students, who may not otherwise be able to afford college, will increase the number of engineering graduates prepared to promote innovation and competiveness in national and regional technology-intensive industries.

The enrichment and support programs build upon effective practices known to help increase retention and degree completion among community college students that transfer to four-year baccalaureate degree programs. The program will include activities to promote faculty-student interaction, offer both peer-to-peer and industry mentoring through a Connect for Success Mentoring Network, provide several workshops focused on academic success, and deliver a suite of career development workshops customized for the S-STEM Scholars. This program design will help to overcome known barriers to persistence of transfer students from community college. These barriers are lack of engagement on campus, underdeveloped professional identity and career goals, incomplete study habits, fewer opportunities to gain practical competence, and the need to earn money through non-academically related work. Assessment and evaluation will provide insight into the retention benefits of student scholarships, learning communities, career development activities, and faculty mentoring/advising. Lessons learned and effective practices that emerge from the program evaluation data will be disseminated widely to the engineering education community and help enlarge the knowledge base regarding attributes and practices of successful scholarship programs of this type.

HUMAN FACTORS CORE PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT The UMass Center for Building the Science of Symptom Self-Management (UManage) is uniquely poised to develop and implement new technological innovations that empower individuals with chronic conditions to achieve a higher quality of life. For these technologies to produce desirable outcomes (e.g., higher quality of life), we must account for the complex contexts (i.e., sociotechnical systems) within which these technologies will be used. The primary goal of the human factors core is to ensure that project team members account for these sociotechnical factors in their technology designs and evaluations, to better ensure that the technologies are useful, well-used, and produce anticipated benefits. Human factors researchers and practitioners have a well-established framework, termed the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS), for including these factors in product and process designs. More recently, the SEIPS framework has been expanded (now SEIPS 2.0) to support patient-centered work, such as the management of chronic conditions. Additionally, the human factors field has myriad methods for understanding how individuals complete processes, for identifying areas of opportunity for design, and for creating and testing prototype designs. The human factors core will support UManage via three broad activities: 1) Guidance to pilot project research teams, to better ensure that our pilot projects succeed with respect to human factors considerations 2) Human factors design workshops and educational materials, so the UManage team and interested individuals at UMass and in our community have a solid understanding of the benefits of human factors approaches, and feel competent to choose and apply specific design and evaluation approaches within their work. 3) Guidance to the broader consumer health informatics community, to provide insight about how our team has successfully included human factors methods in the UManage projects.

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

We are making tremendous progress in healthcare through the wide adoption of advanced technologies including electronic health records, mobile devices and sensors, and genetic profiling approaches. Because of these advancements, groups such as consumers/patients, clinicians, healthcare administrators, and public health officials must make decisions in increasingly data-rich environments. It is therefore essential that we present these data to decision-makers in understandable and actionable ways, via well-designed data visualizations tailored to varied end users. An ERC focused on health data visualization could help transform this vast and growing amount of health data into useful, actionable information. This ERC planning grant will provide a unique opportunity to bring together researchers and stakeholders from across the nation to systematically plan for an ERC that will improve healthcare decision-making - and therefore health outcome - by fundamentally changing the way health data visualizations are designed, developed, and implemented. The planning grant will also allow the research team to develop an ERC that will strengthen our engineering workforce by providing a diverse group of students with transdisciplinary mindsets, experiences, and skills to work in the rapidly growing health information technology and data science landscapes.

After conducting the planning grant activities, we will be positioned to submit a strategic ERC proposal with a clear and cohesive 10-year vision, driven by a large interdisciplinary team of researchers and stakeholders from academia, industry, and government. We will also have operational structures and procedures specified to facilitate long-term shared visioning, efficient and effective operations, professional development opportunities, high-value student training, and clear communication of center activities to diverse audiences. The planning grant will involve continuous asynchronous collaboration between the research team members, an in-person research team visioning workshop, and a 2-day facilitated workshop. The workshop will involve interdisciplinary researchers from the team members? institutions and members of the stakeholder community, including those from healthcare provider organizations, technology companies, insurance companies, and government agencies. The team will also generate a summary report of lessons learned from the planning process, aimed to help other teams who may be undertaking large planning efforts in different research areas.

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.