30 June 2026

Welcome, Harshita Kajaria-Montag

KLU welcomes Harshita Kajaria-Montag as new Assistant Professor Operations. She conducts research on operations management (OM) in healthcare, using real-world data to explore how hospitals and health systems can accomplish more with existing resources. Her work on continuity of care and workload distribution reveals opportunities to improve outcomes for both patients and clinical staff. In this interview, she discusses what draws her to the healthcare sector and what she hopes to impart to students at KLU.

What drew you to empirical operations management and healthcare, and what questions interest you most?

Healthcare is a setting where operational decisions carry real human weight and the implications extend well beyond theory. It has genuine potential for impact, and that is reinforced every time I work with practitioners who are forward-thinking, innovative, and truly interested in bringing research into practice. It is also a field everyone has a stake in: we all experience healthcare at some point.

Against the backdrop of widespread health workforce shortages: How can we do more with the people and resources we already have. That means looking for smart, low-cost decisions such as how clinical work is scheduled, who sees which patient, how workload is shared more evenly across the staff already in place, so that ultimately patient outcomes improves. I find it compelling that large administrative datasets combined with new technologies and sophisticated methods now let us study these questions rigorously.

What have you been working on recently, and who might benefit?

One of my main research streams has been continuity of care: when patients are able to be seen by clinicians who know them. A recent paper continues that work where we find that continuity is not all-or-nothing but has a tiered structure, where the second-most-familiar physician delivers roughly a third of the benefit of a patient's primary physician. That regularity can be turned into a simple scheduling rule.

A second paper turns to the workforce itself, in a hospital nursing setting. Here I look at how imbalances in workload accumulate over time and how that relates to nurses leaving their bedside roles — and whether making workload visible and redistributing it more deliberately could help retain staff.

What would you like to contribute to research and teaching at KLU?

On the research side, I want to collaborate by finding synergies: bringing what I know, drawing on others' expertise, and contributing to KLU's mission of impactful research. Concretely, that means opening up healthcare as an additional avenue while also working with colleagues on questions outside it. I see a lot of room for joint work.

In terms of teaching, I would like students to appreciate the importance of basic principles and theory as well as their practical application. Connecting the two allows them to identify the areas where they can contribute meaningfully and use what they have learned to make a real and lasting impact.

And beyond your academic work: what would students and colleagues tell us about you?

I believe colleagues would describe me as collaborative, approachable, friendly and someone who is easy to work with. Students, I hope, would say that I am generous with my time and feedback, and genuinely invested in their progress and wellbeing.