The students spent 24 hours using lessons learned in the classroom to develop a solution that impressed the judges with its functionality. They competed against 32 other teams to win the top prize of $5,000.
new brunswick new jersey, March 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — A team of Rutgers Business School graduate students has won the University of South Carolina’s Big Data Health Sciences Case Competition after designing a tool to help physicians decide on treatment options for patients undergoing musculoskeletal therapy.
A team of Rutgers graduate students won the online Big Data Health Sciences Case Competition hosted by the University of South Carolina. Attending the students is team advisor David Dreifuss, a professor at Rutgers Business School.
Bhargavi Varanasi, an Indian physician pursuing a master’s degree in healthcare analytics, joins classmates in the supply chain analytics master’s program Devanshu Poddar, Anjani Srinivas, and Vivek Chakraborty to form the Rutgers team. The students received advice from Rutgers Business School Professor David Dreyfuss, director of the Healthcare Analytics Program.
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“Building this in 24 hours was a blur of both whiteboarding and debugging, but it helped us grow,” team members said in an email. “The real value was learning how to transform ‘black box’ mathematics into transparent and reliable tools. The sleepless nights were totally worth it when you realized that behind every data point there was a real human being making life-changing choices.”
fierce competition
The two-day online competition attracted 32 teams from across the country. The students had to data clean 100,000 patient information and determine what was important and what was unnecessary.
“It was important to understand the data,” Chakraborty said. Sorting the data took time, he said, and the computer repeatedly froze because there was so much data to process.
And that was just the beginning. They used modeling knowledge to determine predictive values for a variety of outcomes, including patient recovery, rehabilitation time, and cost of surgery and care. They also had to demonstrate programming, analytical, collaboration, and communication skills to develop and explain their tools to the judges.
While Varanasi helped identify critical data, the data most relevant to determining a patient’s treatment and recovery time, Srinivas reviewed the case multiple times to ensure the team understood the problem and was addressing it correctly. Vivek did some research to find the data that seemed to be missing, and Poddar created a presentation.
1st place out of 7 finalists
As they prepared for the final round, it wasn’t enough for them to just improve on their previously presented work. They wanted to integrate more information about patient treatment preferences into their solutions.
Rutgers Business School students won in the final round against teams from Carnegie Mellon University, Dartmouth College, University of South Carolina, University of Iowa, Florida State University and Missouri State University.
Second place went to students from the University of South Carolina, and third place went to a team from Missouri State University. The Rutgers team will share the first place prize of $5,000.
“This win reflects not only the team’s technical excellence and analytical depth, but also their ability to translate data science into meaningful healthcare solutions,” Dreyfus said after the team’s win. “Their shared decision-making model represents the best of interdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare and supply chain analysis.”
This competition reflects the growing real-world demand in healthcare for tools that allow doctors to access quantitative data to support treatment decisions and better explain to patients whether they will benefit from surgery or physical therapy or how long their recovery will take.
The team wasn’t told why they won the competition, but Srinivas theorized it had something to do with the quality of the final tool. “Our solution was very robust,” he said.
SOURCE Rutgers Business School
