UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Harriet Black Nembhard, professor of industrial engineering and director of the Center for Integrated Healthcare Delivery Systems (CIHDS) at Penn State, has been accepted into the elite Penn State Hershey Leadership Academy for Excellence in Academic Medicine for 2015.
The academy will be held Oct. 12-16 at Keller Building on the University Park campus. It is a rigorous weeklong program that features sessions on strategic planning, collaborative problem solving, case analyses and budgetary challenges within the academic healthcare setting.
While versed in the needed research methods, Nembhard hopes this forum will provide methods and tools needed to both operationalize the work of those in health system and expand its impact. She is also interested in gaining insight into how to build a more efficient supply chain for research and education in health care delivery.
“Many of our CIHDS projects involve applied research in the context of academic medical centers,” said Nembhard. “I look forward to gaining a broader perspective on the challenges faced in these settings.”
Started in 2009, the mission of CIHDS is to promote a holistic approach to understanding and solving problems of access and quality in healthcare. The center does this through interdisciplinary collaboration with the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and the Colleges of Engineering, Information Sciences and Technology and Health and Human Development at the University.
CIHDS received an Industry/University Collaborative Research Center Award from the National Science Foundation in 2011, establishing it as a site of the Center for Health Organization Transformation along with Texas A&M University Health Science Center, Georgia Tech and Northeastern University.
Nembhard also advises graduate students in industrial engineering who are interested in specializing in healthcare systems engineering.