Dr. Hyojung Kang has brought her expertise in quantitative modeling for healthcare systems to her position as assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health. She completed her PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at The Pennsylvania State University in 2015 and joined the faculty of the University of Virginia as a research assistant professor in Systems and Information Engineering. She also had an appointment in the University of Virginia Health System.
 
Dr. Kang’s research focuses on designing, analyzing, and improving healthcare systems through the application of operations management and data analytics methods. She developed a discrete-event simulation model to investigate the impact of admission process policies on patient flow from an emergency department to an inpatient unit. She also created a system dynamics model combined with a multi-criteria decision model to evaluate the long-term consequences of proposed interventions on patient disease progression. Her recent work has addressed optimal configurations of patient care areas in an emergency department, and she has used data mining to predict frequent emergency department users as well as no-shows in outpatient clinics. Her work helps healthcare administrators to understand systemic problems and determine effective interventions.
 
Dr. Kang’s research has been collaborative and interdisciplinary, something she looks forward to continuing at Illinois. “I also look forward to sharing my experience in healthcare with students and helping them to become global leaders in healthcare administration,” she said.
 
As the advisor for capstone projects on healthcare management at Virginia, she mentored teams in 2016 and 2017 that received Best Paper awards at the IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium.