{"id":221017,"date":"2026-06-17T03:15:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T03:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/221017\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T03:15:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T03:15:12","slug":"designing-healthcare-solutions-across-silos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/221017\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing Healthcare Solutions Across Silos"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n \"Team <\/p>\n


\n Team with Cart \n <\/p>\n


\n <\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a high-pressure, high-risk, low-frequency event.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital, two emergency carts hold supplies needed in the unlikely event of opening a patient\u2019s chest to provide immediate life support.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe carts have been around for over 50 years, and they weren\u2019t designed with a systematic approach that applies human factors elements,\u201d said Holt Murray, medical director of the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital and assistant professor of Critical Care Medicine. The carts are also infrequently used.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven our higher-volume procedures, like an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), happen around 90 times a year. When you factor in a nurse\u2019s schedule, working three and a half shifts a week, there is low exposure to them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Yet the specialty supplies are extremely time-sensitive, and someone with minimal experience must be able to reach them quickly.<\/p>\n

Murray was eager to partner with the Swanson School to rethink how the carts were constructed and organized. \u201cI was delighted to have a bunch of engineers come in and look at our processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those engineers were Pitt seniors Maya Jain, Cindy Lkhagvasuren, Garrett Rojik, Madelyn Shaw, and Aidan Wolynn. The team visited the hospital and met with Murray, nurse practitioner Lorenza Schwartzmiller, and nurses on the floor. They worked closely with Schwartzmiller, combining physician nursing and engineering to solve a complex problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the get-go, we understood how high-risk it is,\u201d Jain said.<\/p>\n

As they began the redesign, the team ran tests, timing nurses as they pulled equipment from the existing carts. \u201cThey could see within a few nurses what the fundamental engineering problem was,\u201d Murray said.<\/p>\n

The students inventoried the carts, measuring and weighing all items, and set to work modeling and designing something new. \u201cWe really had to understand how all the supplies were used so we could develop the order in our cart,\u201d said Rojik.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe turned to our visual management techniques. You know, when operators go on the manufacturing floor, they know exactly where their tools are. They have an outline for it and a standard workspace,\u201d Jain added.<\/p>\n

The two carts are used for different lifesaving procedures. As the team explored models, they chose to combine both into one larger cart, with each half devoted to a procedure. \u201cWe spent hours trying to figure out how we could fit everything into the carts,\u201d Jain said.<\/p>\n

‘;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Team with Cart \u201cIt\u2019s a high-pressure, high-risk, low-frequency event.\u201d In the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[3892,3893,18170,3895,73,75,74,13148],"class_list":["post-221017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-banner","tag-dept-banner","tag-industrial","tag-pitt-swanson-school-of-engineering","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-student-profiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}