OSU MSIS doctoral student wins third place at international INFORMS competition

Monday, February 13, 2017

Out of thousands of international participants, Oklahoma State University Management Science and Information Systems doctoral student Pankush Kalgotra’s research impressed the judges at the annual INFORMS poster presentation in Nashville, Tenn.

The three-round poster competition involves a series of reviews and evaluations by experts in the field. Out of 25 finalists per day, the judges select three winners over the course of two days. Kalgotra was selected as the third-place winner for one of the competition days.

“Our poster analyzed the network of diseases,” Kalgotra said. “We created a comorbidity network and examined how this network impacts a patient’s length of hospital stay. For example, if a patient develops a disease that highly relates to other diseases, the patient is likely to get other diseases as well over time. This can impact his/her length of stay. Our model can be directly implemented in to hospitals today because our model beats the existing models.”

A depiction of Kalgotra's disease networking model

The poster, as part of Kalgotra’s dissertation, also examined the differences in comorbidities in the U.S. population groups based on gender, race, etc. Using OSU’s Center for Health Systems Innovation’s Cerner medical database, Kalgotra was able to create a compelling poster with real medical data.

“INFORMS Poster Award is one of the latest recognitions for Pankush’s excellent research in health analytics,” said Ramesh Sharda, vice dean of the Spears School of Business. “We are fortunate to have access to this large electronic medical records dataset through CHSI here at OSU. This project is an example of how data-driven research can benefit medical practices.”

INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, is the largest society in the world for professionals in the fields of operations research, management science and analytics. Thousands of participants from across the globe meet and participate in the annual meeting.

To learn more about the INFORMS poster competition, visit this link.