In his research, W. “R.P.” Raghupathi has seen all kinds of offbeat medical information online—like the blog post saying that cancer patients can use meat tenderizer to unclog their feeding tubes.

While they may mention it to patients, “doctors are not going to prescribe that,” said Raghupathi, PhD, a professor of information systems at the Gabelli School of Business.

And that, in a way, is the point of his current research project. A “big data” expert interested in health care and information technology, Raghupathi is looking for a way to harness all the informal cancer-related information that patients and doctors post online via social media. He and his students are analyzing thousands of blog posts, hoping to create a research tool that’s far more powerful than your average hit-or-miss web search.

“The idea would be to develop some kind of decision support system that individuals can use to zoom in on whatever they’re looking for” on the Internet, said Raghupathi, founding director of Fordham’s Center for Digital Transformation. “Right now it’s an ocean out there. I mean, there’s just so much data.”

He envisions something that would cluster related posts together and show their connections rather than produce page after page of search results. In addition to helping people locate information, he said, his project would provide a patient-driven knowledge bank to complement the more established sources—like medical schools and institutes—and help set directions for research.

“There are all these large amounts of data. Let the data speak for itself,” he said.

A Web of Closely Linked Content

These goals call for something more advanced than a search engine, which might rank sites “but doesn’t actually go into their content,” he said.

The program he’s building would do that. Instead of listing sites that happen to share a few keywords, as a search engine does, it would digest the sites in their entirety and relate them to others that cover the same type of thing, creating a web of closely linked content. Results would probably be presented as a chart or a table, rather than a list, Raghupathi said.

His hope is that people will more easily find obscure-but-valuable postings they wouldn’t have known to look for—like the one about meat tenderizer, or another one he saw, which said Japanese tea can help cancer patients control their nausea. Also, he hopes his program would help scientists would find interesting connections to follow up on.

Raghupathi started the project three years ago, and hopes to eventually incorporate other kinds of social media besides blog posts. He and his students are analyzing the posts with various statistical or data mining techniques—clustering, word count, word association, pattern recognition—and weeding out common words like “an” and “the” to get cleaner correlations.

He noted that users would always need to consider the information’s source, although the program could be designed to highlight some of the more reputable sites.

This kind of work has proven its value in the health arena, Raghupathi said, pointing to Google’s analysis of online chatter to help pinpoint flu clusters around the country. He also noted the digital “mining” of medical records that showed a link between Vioxx and strokes and heart attacks, leading Merck to pull it from the market in 2004.

Raghupathi foresees far more work of this type, given the explosion of online information and the advent of new tools for analyzing it and making “apples-to-oranges” comparisons among different types of media.

“We are collecting audio data, video data—YouTube, Twitter, tweets, all of that—at such an exponential rate,” he said. “There are mountains of data now available.”

Of course, the Fordham analytics students could have told you that weeks ago.

On March 27, students from across the University faced off in the final round of March Data Crunch Madness, an NCAA analytics competition sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Digital Transformation, the Business Analytics Society, and Deloitte.

The event was the culmination of a month of data-crunching for the sixteen teams of graduate and undergraduate students. Starting in February, each team had one week to analyze historical data from past NCAA tournaments, then another two weeks to analyze the current season’s data. The last step was to present their results to a panel of judges.

“When I saw the reports I was stunned,” said “R.P” Raghupathi, PhD, director of the business analytics program at the Gabelli School of Business.

“Many of the international students had never even heard of March Madness. Yet they were able to grasp this very complex domain and use March Madness language. That’s important, because ultimately when they go for job interviews they’ll need to relate to perspective employers using the companies’ terminology.”

One way to arrive at a prediction was through a “logistic regression” model, said Team Data Whiz—one of only two teams to be made up entirely of undergraduates. Using the mathematical model, the group calculated each NCAA team’s chances of winning and then tested the accuracy of their model using data from past seasons.

Once they determined the model was a reliable, they applied it to the current season to make their predictions.

“It’s sort of like grading—we’re basically grading the sports teams and figuring out how they would do against each other,” said graduate student Travis Petersen, an officer in the Business Analytics Society and organizer of the competition.

“Whenever you’re predicting something as unpredictable as a sports event, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s more about trying to minimize your uncertainty.”

The teams were evaluated based on their poster presentations, methodology, and results. First, second, and third-place prizes were awarded by a panel of judges comprised of Petersen, two Fordham faculty members, and two representatives from Deloitte.

The overwhelming majority of teams were spot-on in their predictions, which made for a formidable judging process, Petersen said. To illustrate, he showed the group two graphs comparing the Fordham students’ predictions with those of renowned statistician Nate Silver.

“Your predictions lined up almost exactly with Silver’s predictions,” Petersen told the students during the tense moments before the winners were announced. “That goes to show the quality of your submissions. You guys are picking in line with the universal expert in the field.”

Ultimately, Raghupathi said, the competition’s greatest payoff was the opportunity for students to test their analytic abilities in a real-life situation.

“It allows students to apply their skills to this big data set and very quickly build a model, test it, and then present quantitative data in a way that the judges will understand,” he said.

The winners were:

• First Place: Team Coach K (Xiayu Zeng; Feifei Chen; Yi Chun Chien; and Ziaoshan Jin)
• Second Place: Team Explorer (Dan Luo, Shenglei Zhao, Tianmiao Zhou, and Linsheng Shen)
• Third Place: Team Fab 5 (George Kernochan, Marcello Fortunato, Sal Cocciaro, and Sanjary Pothula)

Storing data is easy. Sorting it into something usable? That’s another story.

W. “RP” Raghupathi, Ph.D., professor of information and communication systems in the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA), knows that valuable information can be found within the data created daily in industries such as banking and healthcare. Properly analyzed and acted upon, such information can be transformational for a company.

“In airline reservation systems, hotel reservation systems and healthcare, there are millions of records about customers, patients, hospitals and HMOs,” he said. “Computer analytics allow us to apply all kinds of algorithms and modeling techniques to the data set, and then see what kinds of patterns emerge.”

An example of how analytics was used in the healthcare industry—Raghupathi’s area of expertise—is the withdrawal of the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx from the marketplace in 2004.

“Kaiser Permanente was looking at data from patients who used Vioxx for a long period of time. Then, using analytic techniques and other intelligence models, it found a correlation that raised a red flag. That led to more studies, and the drug’s eventual withdrawal by Merck,” he said.

Electronic Health Records, or EHRs, are of particular interest to Raghupathi, because each year there are 60,000 medical errors in hospitals and clinics in the United States. Many such errors could be avoided if doctors and nurses had easy access to patients’ records—a challenge that he has experienced firsthand.

“I was attending a conference in Atlanta in 1997, and I slipped and fractured my left hand, and I’m left-hand dominant. So I went to Emory University Hospital, and they gave me a five-page admission form to fill out,” he said.

“I was living in California at the time, and I thought, ‘I’m sitting here at 11 p.m. and all of my data is in California. I wish there were a way for them to log in and get the data they need, but there isn’t.’ So the nurse helped me.”

Raghupathi said that the new federal healthcare law will bring about 40 million additional people into the healthcare system. That will mean even more data to be analyzed. But access to health records is an issue fraught with competing interests.

“Who owns the data in this distributed environment? Is it the patient who owns the data and has control over it? Or is it the hospital that entered the patient’s admission data? Is it the HMO that approves the bills? Or is it the primary care physician? That’s a major challenge,” he said.

For people who say that their health data should be theirs exclusively, Raghupathi again drew from his own experiences to show how the issue is not that simple.

“Sometimes I want the results of a lab test to be given to the specialist right away. But if I ask them to fax it to the specialist, they’ll say, ‘No, either you pick it up or we’ll mail it to you in three to five days.’ So, right there is time wasted. That data is sitting on the Web in some database, so why not let the pertinent people have access to it?”

With the field of business analytics gaining popularity, Raghupathi helped spearhead an academic initiative that allows students to use IBM software in classes such as “Analytics for Managers.” He also helped organize “Smarter Education: An Era of Opportunity,” a colloquium held last December at Lincoln Center.

“Most companies have gone through the informational phase; they use IT for basic things. And they’ve gone on to the strategic phase for more qualitative types of benefits—customer satisfaction, user satisfaction, etc.,” he said. “But now we see the transformational benefits. The Internet is one example—how it’s transformed brick-and-mortar business into full e-businesses.”

The transformational benefits of IT extend to other areas on which Raghupathi has trained his eye. Along with Sarah Wu, Ph.D., assistant professor of management, he has conducted studies that analyze data from the World Bank to see if there are correlations between a nation’s investment in technology and improvement in its public health.

“We are not saying that by using a computer, your health is going to improve—that’s causality. But countries that use IT seem to have better health, as indicated by certain variables,” he said.

The use of cell phones in rural India and Africa is a good example of creative use of technology. “If a vaccination team is going to visit a village at a certain time, the team will use a cell phone to communicate that to the villagers. So the use of mobile technology is promoting primary healthcare in indirect ways,” he said.

Raghupathi also has examined the role of IT and corporate governance with other faculty, and has shown a correlation between the use of IT and firms’ bottom lines. If companies provide transparency via the Web, then stakeholders feel good and investors have confidence. He advocates companies bringing dedicated technology experts onto their boards.

“There are accounting people and executive pay people; why not somebody who’s tech-savvy and is pushing the firm in the direction of using IT for reporting purposes and communication?” he said. “The operational and strategic aspects of business are there, but academics and the industry have to look at how technology can be used in transformative ways.”