Hospitals of Providence Benefits from UTEP Analytics Group
This past semester, a trio of UTEP business students worked with the Hospitals of Providence East Campus to provide data-driven recommendations that may dramatically improve patient flow at the hospital.
The students — Abril Woocay, Gabriel Guillen and Oziel Gonzalez Solis — are part of the Woody L. Hunt College of Business Corporate Business Analytics (CBA) Group, which hires accelerated undergraduate students to work as consultants under the direction of Gina Galey, a research analyst and lecturer in the college.
The group takes the academic expertise of UTEP faculty and pairs it with the fresh perspective of a burgeoning student to provide insight for an organization to make data-informed strategic decisions. A project and its scope are determined by an organization, which gives students an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between analytics and business.
At the end of a project, the CBA Group presents its findings in a report along with recommendations.
"The hospital entrusted us with its data,” Galey said. "We then used machine learning to find patterns that will tell us if the organization will meet certain metrics based on the data.”
Providing eleven months’ worth of discharge data from the East Campus’ top five units, the hospital sought ways to optimize patient flow. The CBA Group combed through tens of thousands of data rows — broken across more than 50 unique fields — before running the data through an Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine to find patterns maximizing operations at the hospital.
For Gabriel Guillen, the project was an opportunity to show the value of data-driven analysis to the hospital’s directors and ranking executives.
“It’s not an easy task to ask an undergraduate student to present a project, let alone to a room filled with directors and executives,” Guillen said. “I had to create a business understanding and be able to relay our findings to seasoned professionals.”
Galey notes she saw a “spark of engagement” at the end of the CBA Group’s presentation — the data created a conversation for the executives to look, objectively, at itself and make informed strategic decisions which may be implemented in the future.
"This is a very valuable tool for businesses because it gives them data-driven opportunities while also building a portfolio of quality results driven by our students," Galey said.