New PhD Assistantship Links Business and Medicine

Historically, the goals of business and medicine have not always been aligned—but at UC, the academic disciplines are coming together to create a new research role studying approaches to health care delivery.

In a partnership with the department of operations, business analytics and information systems (OBAIS) at UC’s Lindner College of Business, the department of emergency medicine will start a year-long assistantship during the 2012 fall semester.

The assistantship provides funds for an OBAIS doctoral student to work with emergency medicine to design, implement and study new approaches to providing high-quality emergency medicine care. As well as conducting a research project, the PhD student will learn about the culture, decision making, operations and process of research in health care.

The first recipient of the DEM-OBAIS doctoral assistantship is Lauren Laker, a PhD student entering her second year of study.

"I believe that UC and UC Health University Hospital are leading the industry and paving a path where academia and practice bring their skills and knowledge to the same table,” says Laker. "I couldn’t be more thrilled to have been chosen to be a part of that.”

Laker's work will be overseen by assistant professor of emergency medicine Michael Ward, MD. 

"Healthcare is in desperate need of new perspectives to provide safe, timely and high quality care,” says Ward. "This assistantship is precisely the way to develop the next generation of innovative thinkers in the operations of healthcare.”

Craig Froehle, PhD, associate professor of OBAIS and PhD program coordinator, says he and Ward expect the assistantship to begin to develop "a new generation of cross-disciplinary researchers who are devoted to improving health care delivery by bringing new methods to bear on the industry's most complex operational problems."

For more information, contact Ward at wardmj@uc.edu or 513-558-1045 or Froehle at craig.froehle@uc.edu or 513-556-7174.