The student team examined the problem of commercial power fraud and recommended analytically-derived solutions with the goal of creating a safer, sustainable and more equitable environment for its entire customer base. Founded in 1946, SMUD is Sacramento's community-owned, not-for-profit electric service, among the six largest of its kind in the U.S.

The student team assisted a customer-centric, locally-owned grocery chain evaluate its marketing analytics strategy and delivering insights that maximize promotional impact and strengthen the customer relationship. Based in Woodland, Calif., Nugget Markets is a privately owned, $300+ mil. revenue grocery chain ranked 12 consecutive years among Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For.

The student team worked with augmenting industry pricing and analytics experts tasked with improving profitability at a large California grocery chain by leveraging point-of-service and pricing data that capture how internal and external price signals impact customer behavior. Dunnhumby uses the power of customer (big) data and insights to create customer-first and personalized in-store, digital and mobile customer experiences.

Agile Drug Distribution for UCDH Pharmacy 

Students on this project will work on creating an early anomaly detection or early warning of changes in product (medication) utilization. They will use predictive analytics to accurately forecast both near-term and longer-term demand for medications given the anomaly detection. They will also use prescriptive analytics to optimize inventory carrying levels, reorder points, and safety stock to offer the best service possible to all of UCDH's patients. 

Late Arrivals for UCDH Clinic

Students on this project will work on developing a process map detailing the patient journey from home/starting destination to arrival in-room to guide metric definitions and design thinking. They will also create a Tableau dashboard that describes the epidemiology of clinic late start events. 

Ambulatory Access to Care

The region's only academic health center, UC Davis Health is focused on discovering and sharing knowledge and providing the highest quality of care. As providers compete for patients based on both convenience and quality, improving patient access by decreasing wait times is becoming increasingly important for UC Davis Health. The Access to Care project leverages analytics and multiple data sources to provide UCD Health patients with the right care in the right setting at the right time. That requires the student team to assess and propose improvements to existing models to better manage current and projected provider capacity by specialty. The end-goal is to use enhanced model recommendations to inform operational decisions and identify operational tactics to improve access.

Patient Experience

The region's only academic health center, UC Davis Health is focused on discovering and sharing knowledge and providing the highest quality of care. As healthcare has become increasingly consumer-driven, it has become imperative for hospitals and health systems to have a deep understanding of the people they serve (i.e., the patients). Patients provide service feedback through a variety of mechanisms, including multiple-choice surveys and with transcribed free text. The MSBA team is developing a robust and scalable system to provide UC Davis Health leadership with actionable feedback-based insight using statistical and machine learning modeling.

Pharmacy Inventory

The region's only academic health center, UC Davis Health is focused on discovering and sharing knowledge and providing the highest quality of care. The inventory of the pharmacy department of the UC Davis Health system costs over $200 million every year. The student team has been tasked with reducing costs by optimizing inventory levels. The initiative has required the team to analyze historical trends, develop insightful visualizations, and forecast spending. A key deliverable has been a real-time forecasting dashboard that allows pharmacists to track inventory status and highlight significant reorder points.

Homelessness and Healthcare

The region's only academic health center, UC Davis Health (UCDH) is focused on discovering and sharing knowledge and providing the highest quality of care. As the only Level 1 trauma center in inland Northern California, the Emergency Department sees hundreds of patients each day. Many emergency department visitors are patients experiencing homelessness (PEH), with chronic diseases burdens combined with high barriers to accessing routine primary care service. The MSBA student team is extending UCDH's current ability to compute, visualize and predict key care measures to better identify service utilization trends and gaps in resources for PEH. The goal is to create a predictive analytics solution that will help evaluate the impact of new interventions to avoid unnecessary utilization and improve patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes for this population.

As many as one in four college students in California suffer from food insecurity, unable to get proper nutrition, in quantity or quality. The student team assisted the UC Davis Center for Student Affairs Assessment (CSAA) in creating a system to monitor and improve the campus food supply chain.

Students tapped Internet-of-Things technology to explore real-time occupancy data with the goal of understanding how the workforce interacts with their office environment and how to influence productivity by improving space utilization. CBRE is the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm serving owners, investors and occupiers. Headquartered in San Francisco, McKesson Corporation—5th on the FORTUNE 500—is a global leader in healthcare supply chain management solutions, retail pharmacy, community oncology and specialty care and healthcare information technology.