Category: Blog

Hi! I’m Prachi Fozdar, a Business and Engineering undergraduate working as a communications assistant at CHEPS. I was recently able to interview Aparna Reddy, an undergraduate sophomore currently on the pre-med track in LSA, to find out more about her work at CHEPS. 

How’d you get involved in CHEPS?
“Freshman year I joined another student organization, Blueprints for Pangea, with Kishor and he told me during one of the meetings about how he’s involved in CHEPS. I got really interested, so I researched CHEPS a bit more and then decided to apply.”

What made you want to join CHEPS?
“I’m really interested in the systemic components of healthcare because a lot of the research I did in high school was more computational-based. Continue Reading »

Hi! I’m Prachi Fozdar, a Business and Engineering undergraduate working as a communications assistant at CHEPS. I recently got the chance to interview Rachel Zhang, a junior in Biomedical Engineering on the pre-med track. Rachel started at CHEPS this past summer, making this winter her third term. 

Rachel’s story of joining CHEPS is one she describes as “a series of various connections and coincides which led to CHEPS at the same time.” While looking for a capstone project for the engineering honors program, Rachel came across CHEPS. She said, “One of my advisors, Emmett Springer, is a CHEPS alum and knew my interests in healthcare optimization and that I was looking for a capstone, so he referenced me towards CHEPS. Continue Reading »

Hi! I’m Prachi Fozdar, a Business and Engineering undergraduate working as a communications assistant at CHEPS. I recently had the opportunity to interview David, an undergraduate junior majoring in Industrial & Operations and Engineering and minoring in Computer Science, to find out more about his work at CHEPS.

How’d you find out about CHEPS and get involved in it?
“So, it was actually during the career fair my sophomore year in the fall. I talked to Jim Molloy from Citi, and he started talking about Professor Cohn, the various classes she teaches and mentioned how CHEPS is a wonderful program to be in. Continue Reading »

I actually learned about CHEPS through some family connections. My dad (Hi dad!) works in the School of Public Health at UM and has known Amy Cohn, the Faculty Director of CHEPS, for several years. When my older sister, Lauren (Hey Lauren, too!), started out as an undergrad at Michigan, she met Amy through my dad and discovered the wonderful organization that is CHEPS. As a BME student, she ended up working at CHEPS for several years during her undergrad career and later encouraged me to check it out. 

When I was a freshman in the College of Engineering and my major was undecided (like, very undecided), it was Lauren who convinced me to set up a meeting with Amy to learn more about IOE. Continue Reading »

Hi everyone, my name is Nicholas (Nick) Zacharek, and I am a senior from Ann Arbor studying Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE), and have been working at CHEPS since May 2019. In my nearly 2.5 years at CHEPS, I can safely say that working here has been the best decision I have made in college. CHEPS has given me the opportunity to apply various skills I have learned in class and grow greatly as a professional. I have worked on projects ranging from simulation modeling to improve patient access to care, to provider scheduling to maximize capacity utilization, and data analytics to better understand trends in medical data. Continue Reading »

This blog is written by Fumiya Abe-Nornes, Nisarg Polra, and Rachel Zhang of the Summer 2021 Surgical Competency Team. 

Surgical residency is just one of many steps that an individual has to go through in order to become a surgeon. The typical path for a surgical trainee is to attend medical school, followed by residency, with an optional fellowship afterwards before practicing. It is during this surgical residency where a trainee is exposed to many different fields within surgery, such as orthopedics, cardiac, etc.

Our project, titled surgical competency, focuses on this residency program. Specifically, we are interested in using simulation to assess how variation, such as in trainee learning curves, transference of skill among procedures, among others, could have an impact on the learning outcomes of a surgical residency program. Continue Reading »

This blog is written by student members of the Summer 2021 Prenatal Team. The team consists of Claire Dawson, Dipra Debnanth, Stephanie Ganzi, Leena Ghrayeb, Meghana Kandiraju, Amanda Naccarato, and Harini Pennathur.

Hello! This is the Prenatal team here at CHEPS! We work with Dr. Alex Friedman Peahl, a practicing OB-GYN physician at Michigan Medicine, to improve prenatal care. The current prenatal guidelines involve a large number of prenatal visits, yet the U.S. still leads in maternal mortality rates amongst developed nations. Dr. Peahl highlighted this discrepancy and emphasized the idea that a large number of prenatal visits may not actually improve postpartum outcomes, and that we may need to refocus our efforts away from providing a “one-size fits all” pre-determined care framework and rather toward providing tailored care to our patient population (through telehealth, social work, or other non-traditional services). Continue Reading »

This blog is written by the Summer 2021 Shift Scheduling Team: Dipra Debnath, Madelaine Emesden, Arlo Halpern, Yvonne Lin, and Shraddha Ramesh. 

The first thing the Shift Scheduling team did this summer was learn how to use the scheduling tool. We did this by watching our staff lead and scheduling wizard, Billy Pozehl, build the Block 2 schedule on Zoom. When we receive inputs from the Chief Resident, we need to make edits so that the information is digestible for the code. He walked us through this process and then told us to “make a schedule we personally think is good.” Continue Reading »

As I reflect on the first year of my Ph.D., I’m amazed at how much I’ve grown, both academically and personally. I embarked on this journey during a global crisis, and as the COVID-19 pandemic made my worries a reality, I quickly had to learn how to adjust. I was expecting to move to Ann Arbor, to attend my courses in a classroom, and to collaborate with my colleagues and advisors in-person. I’d been dreaming of the day I’d start at U of M for years, and not being able to have the “normal” start I was expecting was disappointing, to say the least. Continue Reading »

At CHEPS, our interdisciplinary teams apply engineering tools to solve important problems in healthcare. While we may not always classify it as such, our work often fits within the scope of “health services research” (HSR), a field that considers how healthcare is organized and delivered, and how these systems impact components like healthcare quality, cost, and access. HSR is a key focus of several CHEPS partner organizations in Ann Arbor, including the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI) and the Veterans Affairs (VA) Center for Clinical Management Research. I have found working with these and other collaborators to be meaningful because we have leveraged quantitative skills to change how healthcare is provided, primarily through improving access to care. Continue Reading »