This story ran 4/19/2012 in Perspective Magazine

During an intensive three-month period in fall 2011, UW-Madison graduate students Renaldo Blocker (left) and  Sacha Duff (right) worked long hours in the emergency department of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Whenever a victim of a car accident, stabbing or other incident arrived, they would accompany trauma teams from the moment patients arrived until their surgery was finished.

While the two carried trauma pagers and wore hospital scrubs, they weren’t medical students.

Rather, they are systems engineers, and they were in the hospital collecting data for Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Doug Wiegmann (center), who is midway through a project to reimagine how operating rooms—and operating room staff—work.

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