I hope to build my analytic skills in evaluating health systems, with the ultimate goal of improving patient safety and the quality of medical care.

Over the course of her medical career, Constance Hwang has been asking questions not answered by medical textbooks. As a college intern with Rhode Island's state health department, she asked, how do Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements affect retention of health professionals in the state's medically underserved areas? While evaluating the Oregon Health Plan for a health economics research firm, she asked, how does a new Medicaid managed care program determine what treatments should be covered, and who should decide?

And most recently as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Hwang has asked: Does the growing trend of shifting cardiac, orthopedic and general surgery care from general hospitals to specialty hospitals lead to improved clinical outcomes for certain elective procedures?

She's come to the Bloomberg School to learn how to answer these questions and to translate answers into better care for patients.