Douglas Wiegmann, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, is part of a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers who recently received a five-year, $2 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Caprice Greenberg, the Morgridge Distinguished Chair in Health Services Research and a professor of surgery in the School of Medicine and Public Health, is the principal investigator for the project, which will examine different learning approaches to improve ventral hernia repairs.
The researchers, working in partnership with the Americas Hernia Society Quality Collaborative, will compare the effectiveness of two approaches to video review and performance feedback for practicing surgeons: synchronous surgical coaching versus asynchronous feedback. They say the results could improve quality of care for the roughly 350,000 patients who undergo ventral hernia repair every year while benefitting surgical performance on a broad scale.