N.C . State students and faculty from the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering are working to find better solutions for healthcare issues faced by hospitals.

Associate professor, Julie Ivy and teaching assistant professor, Anita Vila-Parish, are working on research that involves inventory management in the hospitals.

“The research that I and Dr. Ivy have been involved with is optimizing the inventory for pharmaceutical products that are inside of hospitals,” Vila-Parish said.

She also explained the reasons as to why it is complex to manage inventory for hospitals.

“It is a very complex process to manage that inventory which is maintained by Hospital’s pharmacy for a couple of reasons,” Vila-Parish said. “One, many hospitals carry as many as 2000 different medications; secondly, many of them are perishable and once you mix them you have to use them within a few hours depending on the stability of the substance.”

According to Vila-Parish, this means medications cannot be prepared in large batches as it is unreasonable to expect them to be used by the end of the day. If the medications are not used, hospitals have to throw them out, which has serious cost implications.

Because of this, their research methodology involves linking the condition of patients and the demand for key medications.

“What we are trying to do is to create a link between the number of patients that are admitted to the hospital at any day, and look at their condition as a marker for what their demand would be for a set of key medications identified by the hospitals. It might be a medication that may be very expensive, so wasting it is a big issue. It might be a medication that is commonly on shortage, so they want to make sure they have the optimal amount on reserve at all times,” Vila-Parish said.

Working with Purdue University’s school of pharmacy on a case study, the research team has retrieved specific data that will allow them to predict demand based on the number of patients at the hospital involved in the study. Currently, they are looking to get N.C . State students involved as well.

“Right now we are hoping to get some funding so that we can involve graduate and undergraduate students to work with us in developing more models and working with data sets,” Vila-Parish said.

While their goals involve decreasing pharmaceutical waste in hospitals, healthcare is also a focus.

“The healthcare system is also a focus for us, we offer a certification in that area and those who do that program get an internship at a hospital in an efficiency project such as optimizing scheduling models and staffing methods,” Vila-Parish said.

She is excited to work in the area and looks forward to it.

It’s an area where we are very excited to be and the fact that we are making a contribution to someone’s life is in general very appealing. .” Dr Vila-Parish said

Dr. Brian Denton, associate professor in industrial engineering, said that his part of the research looks to design optimal solutions that can be used in treatment of diseases like heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

“The research we are doing involves the use of industrial and systems engineering methods to help improve medical decision making,” Denton said. “My research group is working on a number of different projects including the development of computational models for optimization of treatment decisions to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, and models for designing methods that use diagnostic tests to screen for cancer.”

Denton added that currently, N.C . State students both at undergraduate and graduate levels are involved in the research. Knowledge of operations research, computers and math is needed in able to solve such a problem, according to Denton.

Jennifer Mason, PhD student working under Dr. Denton, said that she focuses on helping diabetes patients.

“My dissertation is looking at optimal treatment of diabetes patients based on their age gender and also their probability of facing adverse events like heart attacks,” Mason said.

She added that industrial engineers are involved in the process, as they can apply traditional methods of manufacturing for healthcare problems.