Rutgers Business School students used their classroom knowledge to leverage data modeling and machine learning to win the University of South Carolina’s Big Data Health Science Case Competition.
The competition included 32 other teams, bidding for a top prize of $5,000.
The students spent 24 hours designing a tool to help doctors determine treatment options for patients undergoing musculoskeletal care.
Bhargavi Varanasi, a medical doctor from India pursuing her Master of Health Care Analytics, joined Debanshu Poddar, Anjaney Srinivas, and Vivek Chakraborty, classmates in the Master of Supply Chain Analytics Program, to form the Rutgers team. The students were advised by Rutgers Business School Professor David Dreyfus, director of the Health Care Analytics Program.
“Building this in 24 hours was a blur of whiteboarding and debugging, but it pushed us to grow,” the team members said in an email to Rutgers Business School. “The true value was learning to translate ‘black box’ math into a transparent, trustworthy tool. Realizing there’s a real person making a life-altering choice behind every data point made the sleepless night completely worth it.”
As part of the competition, students were required to clean data on 100,000 pieces of patient information, deciding what was important and what was unnecessary.
They used their modeling expertise to estimate predictive values for various outcomes, including patient recovery, rehabilitation time, and the cost of surgery or care.
The Rutgers Business School students won the final round against teams from Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth College, the University of South Carolina, the University of Iowa, Florida State University, and Missouri State University.
“[The team’s] shared decision-making model demonstrates the very best of interdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare and supply chain analytics,” Dreyfus said in published remarks.
