Sharon Johnson

I enjoy teaching at WPI because students bring a lot of energy and enthusiasm to their learning, and I am often inspired by their optimism. My teaching also reflects topics that motivate me:  detailed process design in our Industrial Engineering program, improving healthcare delivery as part of the Health Systems Innovation certificate, and exploring the implications of operational excellence in our MBA program.  My research explores the impact of lean improvement methods in healthcare settings, as well as applying systems modeling approaches to design more effective healthcare delivery processes. Recent projects include evaluating lean as an implementation strategy for a suicide safety planning intervention and developing a model to examine the effects of lean training in an organization.  I am also interested in the opportunities that information technologies create by providing new types of data for operational decision making and improving workflows and care delivery.  Recent projects have explored the effects of secure messaging on workflows and examined the implementation of electronic health record systems, including personal health records. I am a founding member of the Healthcare Delivery Institute (HDI), and currently serve on the Faculty Steering Committee.  My research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the New England Veterans Engineering Resource Center.