It is probably no exaggeration to claim that the rapidly escalating costs of health care is one of the most pressing issues facing our nation today - even a cursory look of the media reveals intense public interest and concern. In the United States, rapidly rising healthcare costs threaten manufacturing and service companies with bankruptcy, creating intense pressure to move offshore. Indeed one can make the case that the best way to help prospects for U.S. industries as a whole is to improve healthcare delivery. In recent years, a number of high-profile reports from the National Academies of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine have recommended the development of effective partnerships between the healthcare and engineering communities as a necessary step towards the development of workable solutions to this problem.
The objective of this project is to bring together nationally recognized researchers from healthcare engineering and health systems to educate each other as to their work and potential for collaboration, and to discuss actionable mechanisms for collaboration between the two fields to help move their findings into clinical practice and health policy. The workshop will be held in Raleigh, NC on April 7-9, 2008, and will involve faculty, students, researchers and practitioners from health services and healthcare engineering from around the country. The findings will be disseminated in a report aimed at developing an actionable roadmap for collaboration between these two disciplines.
