Hummy Song

Assistant Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions

Contact Information

Primary Email:
hummy@wharton.upenn.edu

office Address:
560 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: health care operations, service operations, empirical operations management, data analytics

Links: CV

Overview

Hummy Song is an Assistant Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Through her research, she seeks to identify ways to enable service and knowledge workers to increase their levels of productivity. In particular, she focuses on using data to design systems and policies that enable health care providers to work more efficiently without sacrificing quality.

Professor Song’s research illustrates that physicians’ behavioral responses to operational choices have a significant impact on their productivity and performance. In the context of emergency departments, her research finds that publicly disclosing relative performance feedback may help improve productivity by reducing the significant variability that exists in physicians’ workflows and processes. In addition, she finds that dedicated queuing systems equip emergency department physicians with an increased sense of ownership that leads to improvements in flow management and productivity that are large enough to outweigh the variability-buffering benefits of pooled queuing systems. At the hospital level, her research finds that physicians respond to cohort turnover in predictable ways that can be proactively managed to mitigate the negative effects of turnover on hospital productivity.

Professor Song’s research primarily utilizes large datasets derived from electronic health record systems, hospital inpatient databases, and surveys of the health care workforce. For her research, she has worked with hospitals and health care organizations both in the U.S. and in developing countries.

Professor Song conducted her undergraduate, masters, and PhD studies at Harvard University.

Research

Song-Hee Kim, Hummy Song, Melissa Valentine (Under Review), Cross-Disciplinary Temporary Teams in Health Care Organizations: The Role of Partner Variety and Shared Experience.
Hummy Song and Senthil Veeraraghavan, “Quality of Care: An Operations Perspective of Health Care Quality”. In Handbook of Healthcare Analytics: Theoretical Minimum for Conducting 21st Century Research on Healthcare Operations, edited by, (2018)
Elena Andreyeva, Guy David, Hummy Song (Under Review), The Effects of Home Health Visit Length on Hospital Readmission.
Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker, Ryan Graue, Sarah Moravick, Julius J. Yang (Working), Capacity Pooling in Hospitals: The Hidden Consequences of Off-service Placement.
Hummy Song and Robert S. Huckman (Under Review), Cohort Turnover and Operational Performance: The July Phenomenon in Teaching Hospitals.
Description: Finalist, 2015 POMS College of Healthcare Operations Management Best Paper Competition.
Mor Armony, Guillaume Roels, Hummy Song (Working), Pooling Queues with Discretionary Service Capacity.
Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker, Karen L. Murrell, David R. Vinson (2017), Closing the Productivity Gap: Improving Worker Productivity through Public Relative Performance Feedback and Validation of Best Practices, Management Science.
Description: Previously circulated as "Public Relative Performance Feedback in Complex Service Systems: Improving Productivity through the Adoption of Best Practices". Finalist, 2015 MSOM Student Paper Competition. Honorable Mention, 2015 INFORMS Behavioral Operations Management Section Best Working Paper Award.
Hummy Song, Molly Ryan, Shalini Tendulkar, Josephine Fisher, Julia Martin, Antoinette S. Peters, Joseph P. Frolkis, Meredith B. Rosenthal, Alyna T. Chien, Sara J. Singer (2017), Team Dynamics, Clinical Work Satisfaction, and Patient Care Coordination Between Primary Care Providers, Health Care Management Review, 42 (1), pp. 28-41.
Description: Runner-Up, 2015 AOM Annual Meeting Health Care Management Division Best Paper Award.
Hummy Song and Anita L. Tucker (2016), Performance Improvement in Health Care Organizations, Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management, 9 (3-4), pp. 153-309.
Hummy Song, Alyna T. Chien, Josephine Fisher, Julia Martin, Antoinette S. Peters, Karen Hacker, Meredith B. Rosenthal, Sara J. Singer (2015), Development and Validation of the Primary Care Team Dynamics Survey, Health Services Research, 50 (3), pp. 897-921.

Teaching

Past Courses

OIDD101 - INTRODUCTION TO OIDD
OIDD 101 explores a variety of common quantitative modeling problems that arise frequently in business settings, and discusses how they can be formally modeled and solved with a combination of business insight and computer-based tools. The key topics covered include capacity management, service operations, inventory control, structured decision making, constrained optimization and simulation. This course teaches how to model complex business situations and how to master tools to improve business performance. The goal is to provide a set of foundational skills useful for future coursework atWharton as well as providing an overview of problems and techniques that characterize disciplines that comprise Operations and Information Management.
OIDD615 - OPERATIONS STRATEGY
Operations strategy is about organizing people and resources to gain a competitive advantage in the delivery of products (both goods and services) to customers. This course approaches this challenge primarily from two perspectives: 1) how should a firm design their products so that they can be profitably offered; 2) how can a firm best organize and acquire resources to deliver its portfolio of products to customers. To be able to make intelligent decisions regarding these high-level choices, this course also provides a foundation of analytical methods. These methods give students a conceptual framekwork for understanding the linkage between how a firm manages its supply and how well that supply matches the firm's resulting demand. Specific course topics include designing service systems, managing inventory and product variety, capacity planning, approaches to sourcing and supplier management, constructing global supply chains, managing sustainability initiatives, and revenue management. This course emphasizes both quantitative tools and qualitative frameworks. Neither is more important than the other.

Awards and Honors

“Goes Above and Beyond the Call of Duty” MBA Core Curriculum Teaching Award, 2018
Winner, INFORMS Health Applications Society Best Student Paper Competition, 2015
Finalist, MSOM Student Paper Competition, 2015
Honorable Mention, INFORMS Behavioral Operations Management Section Best Working Paper Award, 2015
Finalist, POMS College of Healthcare Operations Management Best Paper Competition, 2015
Runner-Up, AOM Annual Meeting Health Care Management Division Best Paper Award, 2015
Joan P. Curhan Citizenship Award, 2015
Best Abstract Award, AcademyHealth Organizational Behavior and Management Division, 2014
Harvard University Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, 2014
Harvard University Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, 2013
Harvard University Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, 2010
Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for outstanding undergraduate honors thesis, 2008

Activity

Latest Research

Song-Hee Kim, Hummy Song, Melissa Valentine (Under Review), Cross-Disciplinary Temporary Teams in Health Care Organizations: The Role of Partner Variety and Shared Experience.

All Research