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Using Provider Analytics to Improve Patient Health Outcomes

Posted on by Institute for Business Analytics

This article is based on a presentation by Ariel Chandler, Senior Healthcare Technology Consultant at Protiviti at IBA’s Spring 2023 Conference on Healthcare Analytics. 

According to Ariel Chandler, the healthcare is an industry is in flux.  

Aside from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the main drivers of change in the industry is the transition from a fee-for-service model to a value-based model, Chandler said. She explained this transition and the current state of provider analytics in her presentation “Using Provider Analytics to Improve Patient Health Outcomes” during the Spring 2023 Institute of Business Analytics Conference on Healthcare Analytics.  

Provider analytics are analytics related to any healthcare provider, Chandler said, including physicians, nurses, and physical therapists. In her role at Protiviti, Chandler works to systematically improve patient outcomes through provider analytics.  

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Risk and Sustainability: The Intersection of ERM and ESG

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This article is based on a presentation at IBA’s Fall 2022 Forum on Accounting and Finance Analytics: Perspectives on ESG Reporting by Jana Utter, who serves as the Vice President for Enterprise Risk Management for Centene Corporation.

Jana Utter, the Vice President of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) at Centene, is among the practitioners who approach ESG with practical knowledge. Centene is a healthcare insurance provider for over 25 million Americans, primarily through Medicaid, the Health Insurance Marketplace, and Medicare. Seven years ago, Utter created an emerging risk report when she joined Centene, which included the potential risks that could arise due to climate change. 

While property insurers are likely to be impacted by climate-induced events, health care insurers and providers can also be affected. As a company that serves vulnerable populations, Centene is concerned about the environmental impacts on health. Utter discussed events like wildfires and droughts causing water shortages, which often affect those who lack disposable income and are unable to invest in temporary housing or purchase bottled water. Unfortunately, these populations are often the most impacted by weather-related disasters. 

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The Shortcomings of Modern Authentication Mechanisms 

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This is article is based on a presentation given by Tom Stewart, Senior Director of Protiviti’s Attack and Penetration team at IBA’s 2022 Analytics Conference on Cybersecurity. 

In 2017, Tom Stewart, the now Senior Director of Protiviti’s Attack and Penetration team, wrote an article titled “The 8 Character Password is Dead.” In the article, Stewart and a colleague reported their finding that for under $5,000 in equipment, every password in a suite of Microsoft security protocols can be guessed or “brute forced” in just seven minutes.  

Five years later, the eight-character password is still the standard for corporate America — and it has been since Stewart began working at Protiviti, a global consulting firm, in 2007. The difference? Stewart revisited the process with a cloud-computing system in summer 2022 and found that any eight-character password in the world could be guessed for a mere $62.59.  

“Over the past 15 years, there’s been the same standard for passwords, even though I was using a dial-up modem to do hacking in 2007,” Stewart said. “Technology has changed, but the standard for which we hold ourselves to has not changed at all. There’s a shortcoming there.”  

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Data Science in the Wild: Practical Lessons Learned from Developing Analytic Solutions in a Corporate Environment 

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This article is based on a presentation at IBA’s Spring 2023 Analytics Conference on Natural Language Processing and Generation by Greg Hayworth, Associate Vice President of Enterprise Data Science at Humana.

Greg Hayworth started his presentation at the Spring 2023 Analytics Conference on Natural Language Processing and Generation with a quote: “No amount of fancy math can salvage a project which is solving the wrong problem.”  

Hayworth, the Associate Vice President of Enterprise Data Science at the health insurance company Humana, leads teams that use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to build analytics products for Humana. In his presentation “Data Science on the Wild,” he spoke about his experience developing analytic solutions in a corporate environment, or “the wild,” and shared tips learned during his nearly 30 years of work in this area.  

A lot of analytics projects “die on the vine” in the corporate world, Hayworth said, so he offered three principles for ensuring that these projects add value in a new marketplace, starting with solving the “right” problem. He then discussed how to talk about analytics projects as products and why it’s important to deliver the simplest method that actually works.  

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Panel Explores Opportunities, Challenges, and Career Opportunities in NLP

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This article is based on a panel discussion at IBA’s Fall 2022 Analytics Conference on Cybersecurity including Scott Curtis, VP of Service Delivery at Deloitte Consulting, Greg Hayworth, Associate VP of Enterprise Data Science at Humana, Ergin Soysal, Senior Advisor – NLP, Eli Lilly & Company and Akanksha Mansharamani, M.S. in Information Systems student and Vice President of MSIS Women in Technology.

In five years, “ChatGPT” is going to be a $2,000 question on Jeopardy that everyone misses.  

At least that’s what Scott Curtis, Vice President of Service Delivery at Deloitte Consulting, said. While he may have been joking, Curtis and two other panel members agreed that while Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) won’t go away, in the next few years, new generative language models will come and fade quickly.  

Curtis and Greg Hayworth, Associate VP of Enterprise Data Science at Humana, and Ergin Soysal, Senior NLP Research Scientists at Eli Lilly and Company, spoke in a panel during the Spring 2023 Analytics Conference on NLP/NLG, sponsored by the Institute for Business Analytics at the Kelley School of Business. The panel, moderated by Akanksha Mansharamani, an MS in Information Systems student and Vice President of MSIS Women in Technology, discussed current practices, challenges, and career opportunities in NLP and NLG.  

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The Future of Analytics in Cybersecurity

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This article is based on a presentation at IBA’s Analytics Conference on Cybersecurity given by Scott Shakelford, Professor of Business Law & Ethics; Executive Director, Ostrom Workshop; Director, Ostrom Workshop Program on Cybersecurity & Internet Governance; Executive Director, Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research; Provost Professor.

According to Scott Shackelford, Professor of Business Law and Ethics at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, the cybersecurity workforce demands around the world are massive.  

The numbers speak for themselves: the global cybersecurity workforce shortage is 1.8 million jobs, including 314,000 jobs in the United States. There are ample job opportunities in cybersecurity, from data protection to professional certifications and even space cybersecurity, and interested students can get the training they need for these careers through IU.  

“It’s amazing that these workforce demands just seem to keep growing,” Shackelford said. “The arena of cybersecurity, and a lot of sub-areas, are truly recession-proof.”  

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Physicians as Persuaders: Evidence from Hospitals in China

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This article features the work of Jia Xiang, Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Kelley School of Business. 

Patients visit a physician to be treated for an illness or other medical condition.While physicians do consider their patient’s well-being when giving treatment advice, in reality, there are often more factors at play than simply the patient’s health and wellness.Physicians’ financial interests, including how much they are paid for the service, can cause their interests to be different from their patient’s. These interests become especially relevant in conditions with discretionary treatment options. 

On the other hand, the patient usually assumes — or is expected to assume — that the physician will make treatment decisions based on the best possible outcome for the patient as well as their own financial interests.   (more…)

Measuring Adversarial Attacks Against Deep Learning Models

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This article features the work of Sagar Samtani, Assistant Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies; Weimer Faculty Fellow; Director, Kelley’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (DSAIL) at the Kelley School of Business. 

As machine learning has advanced, Deep Learning (DL) models, which are used to perform machine learning that is inspired by the structure of the human brain, have had significant success in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These models have improved the performance of text classification and text regression tasks, but have also proved to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks.  

The authors propose a new explanation-based method for adversarial text attacks using additive feature attribution explainable methods, or tools that can help explain the outputs of machine learning models. These tools measure the sensitivity of inputs when creating black-box adversarial attacks on DL models that perform text classification or regression.  

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Healthcare Analytics Within a Large Indiana Health System

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This article is based on a presentation at IBA’s Spring 2023 Conference on Healthcare Analytics by Keith Kilgore, Executive Director of Clinical Performance Improvement at IU Health and Joshua Sadowski, Senior Data Analyst for Quality, Safety, & Infection Prevention at IU Health Methodist/University Hospitals.

The data and the processes surrounding healthcare analytics are complex, which is clearly demonstrated by the analytics infrastructure employed by Indiana University Health and the projects taken on by the data analysts at IU Health. The infrastructure includes four main layers and four domains of tools, according to Joshua Sadowski, a Senior Data Analyst for IU Health Methodist & University Hospitals. 

While the infrastructure is layered, Sadowski said that the purpose of performing analytics for healthcare professionals is simple: to help clinicians give patients better care.  

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ESG Assurance and Internal Controls

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This article is based on a presentation at IBA’s Fall 2022 Forum on Accounting and Finance Analytics: Perspectives on ESG Reporting by Robert Hirth, Senior Managing Director at Protiviti, and Steve Wang, Managing Director at Protiviti. 

As companies around the world become increasingly aware of the need to focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, consulting firms like Protiviti are playing a crucial role in helping them navigate this complex landscape. 

Bob Hirth, a longtime executive with Protiviti, has been at the forefront of the ESG movement for years, and he believes that there is tremendous opportunity for those with the right expertise in accounting, finance, and analytics. 

Hirth notes that ESG reporting and sustainability standards have rapidly become global topics that companies ignore at their peril. In fact, he sees this as an opportunity for students and others interested in ESG to make a significant impact in the world. 

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