Resoundingly Human: Looking ahead with the 2020 INFORMS President

01/29/20 • 15 min

It’s a brand new year at INFORMS and we are all looking forward to an incredible 2020, especially as this year marks the 25th anniversary of INFORMS! In this episode, I am joined by the 2020 INFORMS president Pinar Keskinocak, to discuss her goals and objectives over the coming year.

Previous Episode

Resoundingly Human: Working smarter, not harder, to improve healthcare transparency

Healthcare is a complex, often overwhelming subject, and the effort to match patients with providers based on patient needs and provider ability, known as the patient provider alignment (or PPA) problem, has consistently proven difficult to tackle. In the past, this was thought to have been exacerbated by the limited availability of information available to the public regarding providers and their performance, which could help facilitate better patient provider matches. However, despite efforts to increase transparency by making healthcare data open and available to the public, the PPA problem still persists. In this episode, I am joined by Soroush Saghafian professor with Harvard University, whose research in the INFORMS journal Operations Research, “Can public reporting cure healthcare? The role of quality transparency in improving patient-provider alignment,” takes a deep dive into exploring this issue and offering some potential solutions.

Next Episode

Resoundingly Human: Can doctor ego impact your diagnosis?

Operations research and analytics play a key role in advancing medical technology and methodology, with improvements to diagnostic testing, both conventional and AI-based tools, helping doctors more easily and accurately identify and treat medical conditions, providing better patient outcomes.

But what happens if doctors aren’t using these tools, either out of concern over the costs incurred by the patient, or because they hold their own personal diagnostic abilities in higher regard, relying on that over diagnostic testing?

In this episode, I am joined by Tinglong Dai with the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, as well as his coauthor, Shubhranshu Singh also with the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, as well as the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences. Their research titled, “Conspicuous by its Absence: Diagnostic Expert Testing Under Uncertainty,” in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, looks at barriers that stand in the way of more consistent adoption of diagnostic tools, including AI, that can aid in a physician’s diagnosis.