Brian Dudis
BS ISE 2004
Premier, Inc.
Gibsonville, NC
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Premier Inc. is a hospital performance improvement alliance with 1,700 participating not-for-profit hospitals and health systems serving communities nationwide. Premier serves these hospitals and systems through group purchasing savings, clinical and operational improvement resources, and insurance/risk management.

The industrial engineer has become a vital part of health-care systems, as they have recognized the importance of addressing financial and efficiency concerns, in addition to caring for the customers’ clinical and emotional needs. Health-care organizations are using data analysis and process re-design to attain this goal.

My role with Premier has relied heavily on my training as an industrial engineer. I work as a consultant, on-site at two facilities in the state of North Carolina. My role is to help the organizations measure and improve their labor usage, facilitate process improvement, and serve as a networking conduit with other organizations.

One of my major tasks is to manage the organization’s labor productivity and provide valuable reporting details using a Premier web tool. This data is also benchmarked against other facilities using custom peer groups. These reports are vital in uncovering where there is an opportunity to improve.

Once this opportunity is revealed, my responsibility is to assist in improving the current process. This is accomplished through facilitating teams, flowcharting processes, and performing observations to find delays, inefficiencies, and breakdowns of communication. This is where systems engineering shines above all disciplines. Having the mindset to see the interaction among departments, people, and equipment is essential in making real gains of improvement.

Finally, one of my tasks is to network with other facilities to understand best practice methods and apply those to my facilities. I help by using Premier’s large network of health systems to initiate communication and then apply the improvement models into my hospitals.

My favorite part about my job is that I am constantly involved in many different areas from day to day. Working in healthcare, there is also a feeling that I am making a positive impact in the world. Whether I am working on a high profile team to reduce the turn-around time for an urgent laboratory test or am just helping develop a simple database tool, I enjoy that I am making the lives of patients and their families better.

As a graduate of the ISE program at Ohio University, I feel that I was well prepared for my current role for three major reasons:

• Appropriate curriculum that helped me to think system-wide and have the statistical knowledge that I need.
• My professors were easily available for support.
• My participation in the engineering co-op program gave me the experience to know what to expect and sharpen my skills for “real-life” work.