About
Sudeep Hegde holds a Ph.D. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from University at Buffalo (UB) – State University of New York. Previously, he has worked in research positions at Texas A&M University and at UB. From 2015 to 2018, he was a Research Fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. His research interests are in developing proactive ways to learn about human adaptive performance in complex sociotechnical systems, and translating those insights into effective design of technology, processes, policies, and their inherent interactions. To this end, his work has produced knowledge elicitation tools that have been implemented at large multispecialty hospitals to learn about adaptations in frontline healthcare work. Sudeep’s work also involves the use of human factors and cognitive engineering methods to develop user interfaces for decision making and training in various healthcare domains, such as surgery and emergency medicine. A recent project in collaboration with Dr. John Absher, neurologist at Prisma Health, is aimed at designing a novel graphical user interface to support neurological imaging and research tasks within high-performance computing environments. The project is funded by the Prisma HSC Transformative Seed Grant.
For more information, see his department profile.
How their research is transforming health care
The increasing complexity of healthcare poses a significant challenge to the delivery of safe and effective care to patients. Sudeep Hegde’s research has applied systems science frameworks, mainly Resilience Engineering, in healthcare organizations to enable better learning and insights on improving performance. Tools such as the Resilience Engineering Tool to Improve Patient Safety (RETIPS) have been implemented at large multi-specialty hospitals to complement traditional incident reporting systems, to focus more on successful adaptations in everyday frontline work. For instance, RETIPS was recently implemented at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) by their department of Radiology to study how their unit adapted to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings have helped support the senior leadership’s policies on continual and proactive communications with staff during the pandemic. At a task-level, Dr. Hegde’s work has contributed to the design and improvement of user interfaces for decision making and training, particularly in emergency medicine and surgery. His work continues to expand the scope of systems engineering tools and techniques to improve performance in healthcare.
Health Research Expertise Keywords
Faculty Scholar, Resilient health care, human-technology interaction, adaptive capacity, cognitive systems engineering, decision making, organizational learning
