Professor Abigail Wooldridge, Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and recent recipient of the University of Illinois System Presidential Medallion, will present on how laboratory testing – diagnostic, screening or surveillance – plays a key role in containing outbreaks of infectious diseases. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, laboratory testing was particularly challenging – the few tests available were slow and plagued by issues in supply chains. Much work initially focused on developing novel testing processes that decreased cost, shortened turnaround time and avoided supply chain bottlenecks – one resulting diagnostic test is the covidSHIELD test. Industrial and systems engineering approaches, especially from the human factors/ergonomics (HFE) domain, can support the implementation of these tests. We present the process we used in a translational research project to deploy the covidSHIELD test in a mobile testing system that included a CLIA certified laboratory, associated information technology and collection sites. We describe the industrial and systems engineering techniques utilized as well as continuing research efforts. Our results show that HFE specifically, as well as the entire industrial and systems engineering discipline, can make important contributions to the response to emergent global health problems, such as pandemics, by rapidly designing and improving necessary systems and processes.
