Q. What percent of the lab work does your company do?

A. Outside of Tripler (Army Medical Center) and Kaiser (Permanente), we run about 60 percent of all the inpatient lab service. We're running 14 hospital labs. In the outpatient markets, we're probably about 50 percent, I would think.

Q. What's the main challenge for your company?

A. The main challenge is getting qualified employees in the technology area. There is a national shortage of medical technologists, technicians, laboratory assistants. To give you an example, in the old days there used to be a school called the Medical Technology School, which was part of the University of Hawai'i. It used to have 30 to 40 students graduate each year. Right now we only have about five students graduating each year, so it's not enough to support all of the operations in Hawai'i. So we have a real serious shortage of techs. We are participating with the UH in an internship program and also we have in-house full-time educators, two full-time medical technologists training these young people.

Q. Are you fully staffed now?

A. We have a shortage of staff. I think in the medical technology field, we have 30 to 40 people short. And every hospital I know is short. We're not the only one. We're constantly recruiting.

Q. Have you considered expanding outside of Hawai'i?

A. In 1997 we had a chance to do business in Colorado, in Denver. We started a joint venture with a hospital group there, so we were running five hospital labs in Denver. It was very successful. The hospitals were very happy with the arrangement with us. But since I had to run both Hawai'i and Denver businesses, I couldn't keep up. I was travelling all the time and I couldn't handle any more pressure. So I sold it in 2001 just before 9/11 and we got out. But we gained a lot of experience through that. It was very profitable. It even helped the Hawai'i operation because of the volume.

Q. So what are you doing now to stay ahead?

A. The other area we're also investing heavily is in automation for the laboratory. We have some degree of automation but we want to go total automation using robot techs. There are a number of systems out there, but none of them has been working that good. In some ways it makes it worse. So we've been really studying and taking time.

Q. Are there any tests that still need to be sent to the Mainland?

A. There is not a single laboratory that does everything in-house, because there are 2,000 tests. Certain tests we just don't have the volume or the expertise, so we do send out, but that's a very small portion of our total. I would say 1 or 2 percent of our total.

Q. How many labs do you have?

A. We have over 70 locations (and 900 employees) throughout the state. They are not all testing laboratories. Many of them are drawing the blood and whatnot. Actual testing laboratories, I think, about 14 locations. Since the government and the insurance companies continue to reduce reimbursements instead of keeping up with inflation, the only way to survive is to increase volume. So I decided to grow to survive. During the process, lots of labs went under in the last 10 years. We used to have 10,000 labs in the country. Right now there are only 2,000 to 3,000 labs because most of the labs couldn't make it.

Q. How important is accuracy?

A. We have four to five different federal and state agencies check our quality of work. They send an unknown sample and check. So they give you a license depending on your performance. There are lots of agencies to monitor, and we always come out almost close to perfect in all of the tests that we do. If you don't meet them, then you lose your license.

Q. Do you have a business philosophy or a life philosophy?

A. The person that I admired most is Byung-chul Lee; he was the founder of Samsung Group. I read his personal biography and that really made a big impression on me. His guiding principle was reading Confucius' "Analects." He learned his philosophy from reading Chinese classics, and I followed his model of how to deal with employees. ... He says it's important to spend time and get good employees. So he spends sometimes several days to pick one good employee, really observing the person. Once they're employed, he treats them like his own family. That's ... quite different from the western culture, where everybody is watching each other, suspicious. I don't deal like that with my employees. It's all working together for the same goal, trying to promote healthcare for the state.

Q. What's next for you?

A. My daughter (Alyssa Park) is working with me. She's our chief operating officer. She's a graduate of Hilo High School. She got a JD MBA from Cornell and worked with a big company in New York restructuring mostly healthcare, insuring hospitals. My wife thought we could use somebody like her. I was very reluctant as to how it was going to work out.

So one Christmas vacation, she came, and I interviewed her and said, "It looks like she's promising." I really had to hire her just like everybody else, and if it doesn't work out, she said she'll leave and there would be no bad feelings. She really exceeded my expectations. I came from a totally pathology background without an outside business experience. Whatever I learned, I learned on my own. ... But she learned it from a professional school and then working under a big company, a Wall Street company. So her views are a little different. I found that her views are very refreshing and some of the ideas I would have never thought about. So I have a different respect for her and I let her do a lot of day-to-day stuff. She'll take over the company and I'll support her. We're sort of in the transition right now.

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.