IME faculty members receive seed grant funding from the College of Engineering
4/4/2016
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Researchers from the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (IME) submitted two of the six proposals that have been selected to receive funding through the College of Engineering’s Multidisciplinary Seed Grant program.
A total of 34 grant proposals were submitted for consideration from faculty across the college.
Soundar Kumara, Allen E. Pearce and Allen M. Pearce Professor, was awarded $20,000 for his proposal titled “Discovering patterns in self-reported care experience data and clinical outcome data to improve patient experience.” Gordon Pang, assistant professor, is the co-principle investigator on the one-year project.
The proposal explores the new area of patient-centered health care and will be done in collaboration with Geisinger Heath System at Danville, Pennsylvania.
“Geisinger firmly believes in providing a caring patient experience,” said D. Priyantha Devapriya, manager of analytics and operations research at Geisinger Health System. “By partnering with Dr. Kumara, Dr. Pang and students, we will discover patterns in patient-reported care experience and clinical outcome data to develop new hypotheses on the relationship between care experience and clinical outcomes.
“While Geisinger brings domain expertise, clinical and patient experience data, and a clinical laboratory to rapid test new ideas, the IME Department at Penn State brings world-class data mining and health analytics expertise, faculty and access to graduate and undergraduate students to make this collaboration a success.”
Harriet Nembhard, professor and director of the Penn State Center for Integrated Healthcare Delivery Systems (CIHDS), received $20,000 for her proposal, “Demand Management for a Mobile Intervention to Support Chronic Heart Failure in the Community.” Mt. Nittany Medical Center has partnered with Nembhard on the one-year project.
“The Mount Nittany Medical Center Department of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) has created a Mobile Integrated Healthcare Team to focus on patient-centered out-of-hospital care,” said Kassandra Boti, medical director of the Department of EMS at Mt. Nittany Medical Center. “Our community paramedics will visit some congestive heart failure (CHF) patients in their homes following discharge in an effort to decrease our 30-day readmission rates for CHF patients.
“We look forward to collaborating with researchers from the IME Department at Penn State as they will be an invaluable resource for this initiative.”
Kumara, who is also a Geisinger Fellow, oversees the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Analytics at Penn State. His research interests are in graph analytics, the “Internet of Things” and health care analytics and modeling. Pang’s research centers on applied probability, stochastic control, stochastic networks and queueing systems.
In addition to directing CIHDS, Nembhard is responsible for the Laboratory for Quality Engineering and Systems Transitions. Her research interests include quality improvement in health care systems, data visualization and multivariate modeling of health care data and decision making in health care.
For a complete listing of the awards, see the college’s announcement.
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Soundar Kumara
Gordon Pang
Harriet Nembhard
