One of the key challenges to health care access in Canadian hospitals is growing overcrowding of the Emergency Departments (EDs), leading to the medical personnel overload, and the excessive waiting times to receive proper care. These adverse effects directly impact the patient satisfaction levels, the ability of the medical professionals to attend promptly to patients' health issues, and generate unnecessary costs. Addressing the sources of waste and improving the process provides better care and higher patient satisfaction, as well as increases operational efficiency and the ability of the medical professionals to intervene on time. This paper describes an effort aimed at improvement of patients' experience over their ED stay. A combination of Lean tools were used to analyze, assess and improve the current situation. Simulation models based on current and future (desired) states were developed. Comparative analysis of both enabled verification of feasibility of proposed solutions, and provided quantifiable results.
Entrepreneurship education is gaining momentum in today’s world. This article focuses on a teaching intervention introducing engineering students to multidisciplinary innovation and entrepreneurship, using experiential learning and the lean start-up method. We compare the experience and attitude change of engineers enrolled in a mixed cohort of undergraduate business and engineering students to those enrolled in an engineering-only cohort. To evaluate the effectiveness and outcome of the program, data were collected at the very beginning of each course and at their completion. Results indicated interest in entrepreneurship significantly increased at the end of the course and supported the concept that interest in entrepreneurship can be positively motivated through experiential learning. The engineering-only cohort experienced a greater change in entrepreneurial interest and were challenged more over the course of the term than the multidisciplinary cohort. Nonetheless, the multidisciplinary cohort benefited by interacting with business students and leveraging the shared disciplinary experience.
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