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There’s an expression industrial engineers like to use: “We don’t guess, we test.” That’s the approach Lindsay Cormier is using to help improve healthcare in Nova Scotia.

Cormier completed her undergraduate Industrial Engineering degree at Dalhousie University in 2024 and now works for Nova Scotia Health’s Performance & Analytics team.

“My role here is really about making healthcare systems work better for both patients and staff,” she says. “A lot of the time, teams come to us and say, ‘We don't have additional resources, but we still need to do better.’ I think that's where industrial engineering is really valuable. We improve systems without really increasing costs. Oftentimes we redesign how existing resources are already used.”

Healthcare is complicated and multifaceted, but by analyzing specific processes, industrial engineers like Cormier can make recommendations on everything from staffing numbers to office layouts.

She says, “I often time go into clinical and administrative areas and map out how work actually happens day-to-day at a detailed level. Then from there we do a lot of process mapping for things like bottlenecks, areas for rework, process delays, and inefficiencies that ultimately affect patient care or staff workload.”

The ultimate goal is to help make the system more efficient and sustainable.

Optimizing Patient Care

Take emergency department staffing for instance. How can a hospital determine the optimal number of staff for any one shift? For specific emergency departments, Cormier looked at historical data including the times patients arrived, how long they waited, whether they left before being treated, and what care they received. Using that real-world data, she built simulation models and used them to test different scenarios.

“That lets us test questions, like what happens if we had one extra physician during peak hours? How does the system react then? How do wait times differ? So instead of guessing, we can test thousands of scenarios virtually, and find options to best match resources to patient demand,” Cormier says. Sometimes, solutions that may seem obvious — adding another nurse to a shift, for instance — turn out to have little to no effect, while others can make a dramatic difference.

One other area Cormier works in is cognitive ergonomics, which she describes as “the cultural functionality of a space.” That includes designing and setting up spaces that are pleasant and comfortable to work in — whether that means access to sunlight, or having a space set up so everyone in it can get their job done.

Industrial engineers can come in at any step of the process, but Cormier says it’s most effective to have them as part of the discussion early, to help prevent problems from arising. “I truly believe that any important discussion going on about major processes or direct patient care — process-wise, industrial engineers should be sitting at the table,” she says. “Because if we're not at the initial table, we 100% will be down the road.”

Driven by Healthcare

In addition to advising on processes, Cormier also builds digital tools and dashboards that give administrators and managers access to the real-time data they need to make decisions, as well as “geographical tools that show where different services or resources are in the province, and how accessible they are to patients,” she says. “So, being able to query down hundreds of care locations in seconds, rather than having to make several calls, or checking five or six documents and trying to find up-to-date information. I'm constantly creating different tools to make things more sustainable, and trying to make a one-stop shop for a lot of different projects or resources.”

Cormier originally planned to study Civil Engineering at Dal and hadn’t even considered Industrial because “I pictured factories and smokestacks, which is a really common misconception.” But she says after attending an Industrial Engineering open house and hearing Dr. Noreen Kamal speak about her work in stroke care, “I learned how industrial engineers can work within healthcare systems, and especially in the public sector as a whole.”

She would go on to do two of her three co-op terms in healthcare — one in Dr. Kamal’s Health Care Optimization and Analytics Lab, and the other with Nova Scotia Health as part of a partnership between Dalhousie’s Industrial Engineering Program and the health authority. Those experiences, Cormier says, gave her “real exposure to healthcare challenges really early.” And, more broadly, her Dalhousie education “played a huge role in exposing me to more of the human-centred and applied problem-solving side of engineering.”

While working at Nova Scotia Health, Cormier is also continuing her graduate studies at Dalhousie. Her Master’s thesis, supervised by Dr. Peter VanBerkel, builds on work her award-winning undergrad Capstone team did on optimizing transfers of patients in long-term care. Her current research focuses on “long-term care capacity planning” with “the goal of improving safety and reducing adverse events.”