BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Three professors and a doctoral candidate in operations and decision technologies at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business have received some of the top honors in their field, as recognized by their peers.
Earlier this month, assistant professor Jonathan Helm (pictured) received the Pierskalla Best Paper Award, which recognizes research excellence in the field of health care management science. This is the highest honor for this area. It was presented at the INFORMS Conference on Operations Research and Management Science.
Mochen Yang, also an assistant professor, received the Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award, which recognizes outstanding dissertation research by scholars in the field of information systems. Doctoral candidate Jane Tan was a runner-up for the same award, presented by the Information Systems Society.
Another Kelley professor, Munirpallam “Venkat” Venkataramanan, will be honored by the Decision Science Institute when it convenes for its annual meeting this weekend.
Helm’s research, which he co-authored with Pengyi Shi, a professor at Purdue University, and two researchers at Lean Care Solutions, focuses on the question of when to discharge a patient.
A crucial issue for many hospitals is not having patients end up back in their care. Since 2012, Medicare has imposed penalties when too many patients return after a hospital stay. The U.S. Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program helps lower readmission rates for certain conditions.
In the winning paper, Helm and his colleagues developed a practical decision support tool to aid hospitals in managing the delicate balance between readmission risk at discharge and ward congestion. Their framework integrates a new prediction model that updates the readmission risk over a patient’s hospital stay with a decision process to optimize state-dependent discharge decisions.
Helm’s research paper, “Timing it Right: Balancing Inpatient Congestion versus Readmission Risk at Discharge,” will be detailed further in a future journal article.
Yang’s winning dissertation, “Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of User-Generated Content and Engagement Behavior on Facebook Business Pages,” focused on the consequences when individuals use social media platforms such as Facebook to interact with companies and with each other on company-managed business pages. Two thirds of of the dissertation research has been accepted for publication in the journal Information Systems Research.
Tan’s dissertation, “Essays on Social Media Fundraising and E-Commerce,” studied social media fundraising and electronic markets. One component of her dissertation looks at how social networking sites have emerged as an important channel for online donor engagement and charitable fundraising. She also looked at the impact of shipping pricing and how live chats can affect the way consumers assess online sellers’ trustworthiness.
They were recognized at the INFORMS conference Nov. 3-4 in Phoenix.
This weekend in Chicago, Venkataramanan, the Jack R. Wentworth Professor, professor of decision sciences and IU Bloomington vice provost for finance and strategy, will receive the 2018 Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education’s Best Teaching Brief Award.
He will be honored for the paper, “Announcing the Engagement of Sudoku: An In-Class Genetic Algorithm Game,” which he co-authored with Kathryn Ernstberger, a professor of business administration at IU Southeast. The journal is published by the Decision Sciences Institute.