MIE’s Hari Balasubramanian and Colleagues Produce Introductory Textbook on “Healthcare Systems Engineering”

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Hari Balasubramanian

In the United States, medical errors contribute to at least 100,000 deaths annually while, simultaneously, healthcare costs have risen to $4 trillion every year, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the gross domestic product. The juxtaposition of these alarming facts points to the grand challenges of healthcare today. In response to these challenges, Professor Hari Balasubramanian of the UMass Amherst Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department has collaborated with two colleagues to produce the first version of a textbook on the pioneering method of “healthcare systems engineering.” 

As the book explains, “Healthcare engineering encompasses a multidisciplinary approach [for] analyzing and redesigning healthcare processes, workflows, and systems to enhance patient care, resource utilization, and overall performance.” 

The textbook is titled Healthcare Engineering, Analytics, and Decision Sciences: An Introduction. While the material in the book is copyrighted, the pdf of the book and individual chapters can be downloaded for free by students and instructors on the following website: https://sites.google.com/view/healthcareengineering/.

Balasubramanian’s co-authors are Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Sanjay Mehrotra, the director of the Center for Engineering Health at Northwestern University, and Kevin Bui, who earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of California Irvine in 2023. 

Prior to his doctoral degree, Bui worked with Mehrotra on modeling kidney and liver transplantation problems. Mehrotra’s many years of research in health systems and the teaching of an undergraduate industrial-engineering course on healthcare applications led to the vision of a textbook that could widely be used by other engineering instructors and students. 

According to the groundbreaking new textbook, “While industries such as manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and energy management have successfully implemented improved and cost-effective processes with minimal defects, the healthcare industry has been slower to adopt such practices. Despite advancements in technology, particularly in information technology, the healthcare-delivery systems in the United States continue to face significant challenges.” 

In response to these challenges, the textbook demonstrates how the healthcare system can lower its costs and boost its effectiveness. As the book explains, “By embracing and adapting successful practices from other industries, the healthcare sector can strive for greater efficiency, improve quality of care, and ultimately alleviate the financial strain associated with healthcare expenditures.”

Balasubramanian and his co-authors add that “As healthcare enters into the modern era, the interaction of data, technology, and medicine has the potential to improve the quality of care, save many lives, and reduce the cost of care. This is precisely the objective of healthcare engineering. With careful design, engineering, and management of processes, supplemented by effective use of technology, we can bend the cost curve and improve patient outcomes.”

The textbook’s website notes that it is suited for undergraduate or master’s-degree students who have taken introductory courses in probability, basics of calculus, and linear algebra. Depending on the chapters used from the book, the developed courses can be introductory (e.g., junior level) or more advanced (senior/master’s level).

According to Balasubramanian,“For UMass Industrial Engineering (IE) undergrads, this book could be quite useful since it succinctly summarizes key core courses in the UMass IE program such as probability and statistics (MIE 273), optimization (MIE 380), Markov chains and queueing (MIE 380), simulation (MIE 373), and statistical learning and quality control (MIE 422 and MIE 522), and introduces more advanced topics (such as survival analysis, data imputation, decision trees, case studies, etc.).”

Balasubramanian also says that he and his colleagues expect to update the initial version periodically. 

Balasubramanian is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award and has collaborated with the Massachusetts General Hospital, Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, and University of Massachusetts Medical School of Worcester on healthcare-engineering projects. His research includes mathematical modeling applied to healthcare in order to improve patient flow and reduced patient delays in outpatient, inpatient, and emergency-room settings. (February 2025)