Date: 7/12/2008, Saturday
Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Brief introduction:
Are healthier patients more satisfied with their care than sicker patients? To understand how post-visit patient satisfaction is associated with different aspects of patient health, as measured by self-reported health status, a global diagnosis-based health measure, and the visit diagnoses.
Surveys were mailed to randomly selected patients following office visits during years 1998-2006 at Kaiser Permanente, Northern California. Patients were asked to rate the provider’s “skills and ability”, whether they received the “care and services your medical condition required”, and whether the provider “listened to you and explained what was being done and why”; and these 3 items were averaged to obtain a summary score, which ranged from poor (1) to excellent (5). Diagnoses at the visit were obtained from department-specific diagnosis check lists and grouped via the Clinical Classifications tool. A co-morbidity risk score was computed by Diagnostic Cost Group (DxCG) which is based on inpatient and outpatient diagnoses, age, sex, and Medicare status. The primary analysis was cross-sectional: satisfaction was examined in relation to health, the global measure of risk, and the visit diagnosis, adjustment for additional covariates. A secondary analysis was longitudinal: change in patient satisfaction was examined in relation to change in health, in the subset of patients surveyed more than once after visits to the same provider separated by more than 1 year.
4.7 million surveys were received. The response rate was 43%. The average satisfaction score was 4.23 on the 5 point scale. After adjustment for age, gender, race/ethnicity, date of visit, facility, type of provider, higher levels of satisfaction were associated with more favorable self-reported health status (p<.0001), and with less favorable DxCG co-morbidity score (p <.0001). Examples of diagnoses with higher satisfaction levels were cancers, HIV infection, health/emotional counseling or post-operative exam (score range from 4.5- 4.7). Diagnoses with lower satisfaction scores included motor vehicle accidents, tinnitus, otitis media or pain/strain (with mean levels of post-visit satisfaction ranging from 3.8 – 4.0). Among the 254,000 patients who were surveyed more than once, we found that increased satisfaction was strongly associated with an improvement in self-reported health status (P<0.0001), but was also weakly associated with decline in the diagnosis-based measure of health (P<0.0418).
Like previous studies, our study also found that higher self-reported health status was associated with greater satisfaction. Interestingly, however, patients who were healthier according to the diagnosis-based health measure tended to report lower satisfaction. Thus, the most dissatisfied patients tended to be healthier patients who perceived themselves to be sick. Similarly, the most satisfied patients were sicker patients who perceived themselves to be healthy. This might be explained by a tendency for providers to treat sicker patients with more attentiveness than patients with conditions that are bothersome but not serious, especially if—like tinnitus—they are not treatable. Past research on the relationship between health and patient satisfaction has only examined self-reported health status. This may misrepresent how patient satisfaction and health are related. Overall, patient’s perceived health status, their providers’ assessment of their health, and the reason for specific visits, combine to influence post-visit satisfaction in ways that are important to understand in order to learn how to improve care.
Biography:
Dr. Lee has been a data consultant in the Division of Research at Kaiser Permanente of Northern California since 1999. She has currently involved in a five-year project in Cardiovascular Disease Research Network (CVRN), which facilitate and perform collaborative cardiovascular disease (CVD) research among healthcare organizations located in geographically diverse areas. Her current research interests focus on quality improvement and current research projects include early detection and recognition of incident hypertension, pay for performance in relation to variations in quality of care, patient satisfaction, and eCare (Web Care) for Diabetes and hypertension in a randomized clinic trail.
Janelle Y. Lee, MHA, Dr.PH, obtained her BA on business administration at Fu-Jen Catholic University and master degree in Hospital and Healthcare Administration from China Medical College in Taiwan. Her master thesis was focused on strategic choices in response to payment systems. After graduation, she worked as a hospital administrator in the Research and Design (R&D) Department in Chang-Gung Memorial Hospital (CGMH). CGMH is the largest medical center in Asian and well-known in the health care management in Taiwan. Her major duties at CGMH included establishing standard procedures for payment system, planning and setting up Hospital Information System (e.g. computerized medical records and X-ray), and improving the hospital operating procedures. This position allowed her to have empirical experience in healthcare administration, health information, and quality of care. After working in the healthcare industry, she decided to pursue her doctoral degree in the United States. In 1998, she received her Doctor of Public Health (Dr. PH) degree in health system management from Tulane University, New Orleans. Her doctoral dissertation was in the area of productivity and efficiency in managed care settings.
Dr. Lee has published more than 10 peer-reviewed articles in the prestigious health and medical journals such as Journal of American Medical Association, Pediatric Infection Disease Journal, and American Journal of Managed Care. The topic includes the use of antidepressants and medication adherence in relation to treatment outcomes and adverse effect, efficacy of different vaccines, as well as comparison of risk adjustment models.
In coming fall semester 2008, Dr. Lee will bring her experience in health care management and research training to the MBA program at NPU. She will offer health care management related courses which would help students with business management skills needed to manage effectively in health care delivery systems.
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( 3 / 286 )Speaker: Mr. Tom Hua
Date: 6/28/2008, Saturday
Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Brief introduction:
Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an acronym for a specific type of integrated circuit device. For the recent two decades FPGA have been ubiquitously deployed in the electronic systems. To name a few, they are found as useful and as very cost effective components in miniature handheld devices, toys, industries controlling systems, large-scale electronics and computer systems, etc. The demands in use of FPGA grow very quickly and perpetually. These lead to 1). The FPGA manufactures continue to design their parts to be low cost, more powerful, and highly flexible to promote the FPGA market and revenue. 2). The application development environments evolve and become more affordable and user-friendly to help developers in speed up the time-to-market process of FPGA design, and help developers to explore the maximum and optimum capability of the device.
Within the scope of this presentation, I will briefly touch on the topics about some FPGA families and features themselves, their use in the systems, and applications development environment along with my class projects. I expect that this short discussion will excel the FPGA application design study be more enjoyable and effective along with some experiments as a practical approach.
Biography
"My name is Tom Hua. I was born and raised in Viet Nam. I came to the States in 1979.
Thrilled and fascinated when watching a technician wiring up some household light fixtures when I was 11, I knew what I really want to do for my future then. Eager to try things out myself in the following years, I bought many electronics textbooks, electronics tools, and hardware, and started with experiment after experiment. To gain real experience, I went out to market myself and helped friends to fix some TVs and stereos. Then I found my very first electronics job as a tester for a medical instrument manufacture in Pennsylvania in 1979. Realizing my lack of essential fundamental knowledge in electronics, I went back to Iowa and completed an AS degree in electronics technologies even before finishing high school. In 1983, I moved to the Bay Area and started my further pursuit of interests. At the SF Main Library I typed up my first resume. Barely squeezing in many keywords and previous work experience, I managed to fill up only a one-page resume. But that turned out to be enough because it worked! In only fifteen days after settling down, I accepted an assembler position for ClearCom Systems (it still exists) who makes closed-circuit communications equipment. Six months later my first dream finally came true; I was promoted to be a technician.
Up to 1991, I tutored myself more into the digital world. But I wanted more and decided to head to an engineering path. I went to study at several different campuses. Had I not come to study at NPU, I have no doubt that it would have been much harder and longer for me to reach my goal. Of course I stumbled and fail sometimes, but I never gave up easily in my continued search for a right kind of job I would enjoy doing. And I am very delighted to have many professors who taught me how to be a successful interviewee, and stood by me as my job references, leading to jobs after jobs with success!
In the meantime, I completed my AS degree in Business Administration and Management at Ohlone College, Fremont in 2001. It first seemed to be irrelevant to my technical background. But it surely helped me to perform planning, organizing, documenting, and marketing my technical works as well as improving my social skills.
Then the Internet/telecommunications bubble broke violently in the early 2000s. It hit hard on me for four months when I stayed idle without work. Mr. Henry Chang provided such a good reference for me that I landed a job as a technician at Thermo Electron Corp. Although it was a big drop for me from such a high software plateau, that was still a wise choice in that tough job market, he said.
For these years I continue to take classes, keep pace with new technology and job requirements and to prepare for tougher challenges ahead. Simply, it all comes down to hands-on practices, review of my failures, making corrections, and improving my communication skill set - for over fifteen job interviews in the last two years. In the last April through May, I received more than one job offers. Mr. Henry Chang once again helped me reach my goal. I now work for Spectra-Physics as a reputable software developer.
But I want more. I like to share my experience with the NPU students and professors. NPU again provides me such opportunities of success of which I can cherish as well as share with you through my presentations in embedded systems software developments and in the art of job search and interviews... "
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( 3 / 327 )Speaker: Ms. Sheetal Kammaje
Date: 6/21/2008, Saturday
Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Brief introduction:
SRG America is a leading multinational organization that has successfully served the Information Technology market place for over 12 years. SRG America is an IT training and placement company. SRG is looking for Software Consultants and Fresh Graduates to augment our clients in the Bay area and all over USA. SRG America recruits Internship and OPT students. SRG America offers 3 weeks of intensive technical training, and 1 week of workplace etiquette training. After the training, SRG America places the candidate on projects all over the U.S with their clients. Sheetal will be presenting on June 21st at NPU from 1-2pm. She will be open to questions and answers after the presentation.
Biography
Sheetal Kammaje has a degree from San Jose State University in Business Administration. She is currently working with SRG America as a Recruiting Manager. Sheetal has 4+ years experience working with different IT consulting companies.
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( 2.9 / 289 )Speaker: Dr. Henry Chang
Date: 6/14/2008, Saturday
Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Brief introduction:
To create a successful online shopping store is not a simple task. First you need to set up a website, which involves hardware installation (computer, hard disk, networking, etc), software development and installation (shopping cart, etc), and web page design to make your website attractive to your customers. After that, you get into a cycle of the following tasks:
1. Data processing
2. Collecting product data from the suppliers.
3. Updating the product data in your database, including adding new products, removing obsolete products.
4. Computing a competitive price that maximizes your profit.
Promotion
1. Uploading product data (i.e., web feeds) to leading Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) such as Yahoo! Shopping, Google Product Search, and Amazon.com.
2. Adding information to your web pages for search engine optimization (SEO). The easier your products are searched by search engines, the more visitors will visit your website.
3. Sending emails to your customers.
Checking the results of your promotion
You need to know which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and to see how visitors actually interact with your site. For example, the sequence of the visited web pages, how many of the visitors actually purchase products.
To do these tasks once in a while with a small quantity of products is probably not a big deal. However, it is a daunting task to handle hundreds or even thousands of products several times a week. A big company can probably hire a team of engineers to handle most of the tasks mentioned above, and contract certain tasks (e.g., SEO, email marketing) to outside companies. For a medium or small company, it will be very expensive to maintain a development team or contract different tasks to different companies.
This seminar discusses the techniques of providing a one-stop service for eCommerce companies. For example, one can automatically collect product data from the website of a retailer's suppliers, compute the price for each product based on a set of criteria, update the reatialer's website, embed SEO and web analysis information in each product data, and send the product data to leading Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) such as Yahoo! Shopping, Google Product Search, and Amazon.com.
Biography
Henry Chang has more than 30 years industry experience involved business activities in US, China, and Taiwan. He has worked in large companies, including 18 years in HP, and small startup companies (WebKomputing, Lead Digi, and Artistic Vision). His interests are in network security, eCommerce, wireless networks, image processing, and embedded systems. He has been teaching at Northwestern Polytechnic University since 1991. He received his Doctor of Computer Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnic University in 2008, M.S. in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin in 1983, and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tatung Institute of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1974.
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( 3 / 268 )
Speaker: David Bruckmann & Normand Richard
Date: 4/26/2008, Saturday
Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM
-Brief introduction:
Transcontinental Printing is headquartered in Montreal, Canada and has over 60 business units and sales offices in North America. Fremont, CA will be home to the company’s newest site.
Transcontinental expect to hire engineers and technicians by mid-2009 for its Fremont plan. When fully operational, the Fremont plant will be staffed with approximately 108 Production Technicians. Every technician will be expected to operate within the Starpoint system described below:
Starpoint System
The plant will be designed around five Starpoint areas: Business, People, Site (the physical organization), Planning, and Operations. Each Starpoint will have a Navigator whose role is to lead a Starpoint and support operations as needed. Within each Starpoint, there will be four Diamondpoints which are devoted a specific aspects of the Starpoint (e.g., Maintenance). Each Diamondponint will have a Production Technician who is designated to lead the Diamondpoint. Production Technicians (Diamondpoint members and leaders) will rotate roles across Diamondpoints every one to two years.
Production Technicians will be expected to fulfill two roles. The first role is their operational responsibility (i.e., operate and maintain a piece of equipment and/or services within their area). The second is their management role which involves: a) leading an individual project designed to improve a function of the plant; b) participating in a team project; and c) participating in project meetings.
-Biography:
David Bruckmann
David Bruckmann plays a role in designing system architectures and the integration of client data for production and reporting purposes. Specifically, as Systems Leader, he performs mainly the following duties: (1) Plan integration of data flows from production and administrative systems; (2) Work with client(s) to integrate production data inputs and outputs; (3) Manage vendors to ensure delivery of contracted systems/worklows; (4) Develop and implement best practices/corporate standards for future projects; and (5) Be responsible for knowledge transfer of key IT aspects onto the permanent production team.
He possesses a bachelor of arts, as well as master's degree in Information Science.
Normand Richard
Normand Richard plays a role in establishing organizational development and human resources policies and procedures. Specifically, as Director Organizational Development, he performs mainly the following duties: (1) Oversee organizational development activities; (2) Create and implement a specialized system for the training of production and set-up teams; (3) Implement and ensure proper functioning of the recruitment and hiring system; (4) Establish management, compensation and benefits systems in compliance with corporate policies as well as municipal, state and federal laws; (5) Manage human resources activities, including management systems, staffing, health and safety, compensation and benefits; (6) Be responsible for knowledge transfer of key human resources aspects onto the permanent production team.
He possesses a master’s degree in Project Management, as well as certificates in Psychology, Administration and Human Resources
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