Shinyi Wu: "Her arrival in the Epstein ISE department defines an emerging focus on health care applications that speaks directly to USC's strategic objectives."

Shinyi Wu, a RAND Corporation engineer who joins the Viterbi School's Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering faculty in January, 2008, was recently honored by RAND for "outstanding contributions to furthering RAND's mission of improving policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis." 

"Dr. Wu is the associate director of RAND's Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation," said Epstein deprtment chair, James Moore, II. "She has focused her professional career on identifying and applying fundamental IE tools and techniques to solve important process improvement problems associated with the health care industry. Her arrival in the Epstein ISE department defines an emerging focus on healthcare applications that speaks directly to USC's strategic objectives. We can't wait for her to join us."

Wu's award recognizes her success in leading a collaborative made up of multiple research institutions and healthcare organizations to compete for important research contracts with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

These contracts were awarded as part of AHRQ's program for Accelerating Change and Transformation in Organizations and Networks (ACTION), which supports the development and implementation of evidence-based products, tools, strategies, and findings to improve healthcare and health outcomes in the United States.

According to Moore, Wu applied her health systems engineering expertise in two ACTION projects to develop and evaluate strategies for the redesign of healthcare delivery in academic hospitals and safety net institutions.  These redesign efforts focus on increasing efficiency; improving cost effectiveness, quality of care, and patient and provider satisfaction; and sustaining organizational change. 

The projects provide a template for combining theoretical and methodological expertise with practical experience to develop successful research proposals.  The AHRQ ACTION program director noted that Wu's proposal was the best of any submitted during the year.