Bryant University recently launched the School of Health and Behavioral Sciences, which will combine physical and behavioral health sciences with business and data analytics

FOCUS | EDUCATION

Prepping for both science, business sides of health

BY NANCY LAVIN | Lavin@PBN.com

BRAD

Crough doesn’t bat an eye at the prospect of sorting through a dizzying tranche of numbers.

A skilled coder with degrees in accounting and business, he embraces the data side of his job with Brown Physicians Inc. But the technical, jargon-heavy and ever-changing complexities of the health care industry prove more challenging.

After more than a decade as the analytics director for the nonprofit physician group, Crough has come to better understand the health side of his job – at least somewhat.

“Still to this day, it can be extraordinarily difficult,” Crough said.

And when it comes to new hires, training with no background in health care seems like more trouble than it’s worth, even if the job candidate is a highly trained data analyst. Finding someone already equipped to take on the health and data parts of the job doesn’t seem likely – training programs that combine the two disciplines don’t exist, Crough said.

Bryant University wants to change that.

In June, Bryant announced the launch of a new school that combines physical and behavioral health sciences with business and data analytics. The School of Health and Behavioral Sciences builds upon the existing health programs in its School of Health Sciences by incorporating behavioral health, business and data classes into the traditional health care degrees, hiring more faculty, and adding equipment and more lab facilities to support what administrators expect to be a growing roster of students. The new school will also include two new majors, one of which – health care analytics – is the first of its kind in the state, Bryant said.

The goal, university officials say, is to serve the growing and unmet need for workers who understand both the science and business of the technology-dependent industry.

“It’s increasingly more apparent when you talk to industry professionals that the folks on the business side don’t understand the complexities of things [such as] health care providers and patients, and vice versa,” said

UNIQUE PAIRING: Bryant University in June announced the launch of a new school that combines physical and behavioral health sciences with business and data analytics called the School of Health and Behavioral Sciences. Joseph Trunzo, left, the school’s associate director, works with sophomore Alex Spitznagle.

PBN PHOTO/ MICHAEL SALERNO

‘Our industry is completely saturated with data.’

Kirsten Hokeness, Bryant’s biology department chairperson who will serve as the school’s director. “We really see the value in educating both business professionals and those in health and behavioral sciences about how these fields work together.”

It’s not just anecdotal conversations driving Bryant’s decision. Data backs it up, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating health care jobs will increase 16% nationwide over the next 10 years, more than triple the 5% average growth of jobs across all industries.

These jobs are also among the most lucrative. The average annual salaries for health care practitioners and data scientists in Rhode Island each topped $100,000 as of May 2021, the most recent data available, compared with the $62,000 state average across all occupations, according to BLS.

Crough is eagerly awaiting the first crop of graduates from the new school, which will enroll its first batch of students in the fall. Whether it is sorting through the complexities of insurance billings, analyzing data that measures risk in patient care or studying staff surveys to determine how to reduce burnout, there is no shortage of opportunities for health care-savvy data analysts at Brown Physicians.

“Our industry is completely saturated with data,” he said. “The landscape has changed pre- and postCOVID, where there is a void and we really need people to come hit the ground running.”

Even before COVID-19, the pressure has been mounting for health care companies to incorporate data analytics, dating back to the Affordable Care Act signed in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama, said Michelle Rosa Martins, director of patient experience and family-centered care at Woman & Infants Hospital.

“Medical institutions have really been held to a different standard in terms of measuring patient care and satisfaction,” Rosa Martins said. “Data analytics is now considered part of the actual medical service we’re providing.”

While Bryant’s new school is among a slew of health care programs and degrees across the state’s higher education landscape, its emphasis on the relationships between business and health care, and physical and behavioral health, are unique, Hokeness says.

Even Robert Hackey, a professor of health policy and management at Providence College, says Bryant’s programs serve a different function than those at his college, which is also planning to open a School of Nursing and Health Sciences.

Bryant’s business reputation makes its approach to an interdisciplinary health care school more likely to succeed, especially coming out of the pandemic, Hackey said.

“COVID really underscored so much about how data plays a role in teaching us about what’s going on,” he said. “Certainly, one of the things we’ve learned is that health care must be provided in a holistic manner.” n

URI

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Computing Center.

URI’s partnership with the center – a collaboration of Boston University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts – gives URI cutting-edge capabilities to perform more-complex research in areas such as computational modeling, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Since the partnership was formalized last November, Khanna says, URI has capitalized on the advanced computing power in numerous ways. For example, the Graduate School of Oceanography has been developing high-resolution simulations of the storm surges along the Rhode Island coastline; the College of Engineering is designing new materials for use by the U.S. Navy; and the College of Pharmacy has been conducting complex genome sequencing.

“It gives us new capabilities,” Khanna said.

The high-performance computing center is located in Holyoke, Mass., and was established 10 years ago to provide state-of-the-art computing with a low carbon footprint. The racks of servers that fill the 33,000-square-foot computer room and the energy efficient system needed to cool those computers are powered by a hydroelectric plant on the Connecticut River.

As part of the new partnership, URI is also bringing money to the table – a $1.2 million legislative earmark secured by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., for high-performance computing technology at URI.

That funding will be added to contributions from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and UMass Amherst to purchase $2.2 million of computer hardware and software that will be installed at the center in Holyoke.

In addition, OSHEAN Inc., a North Kingstownbased nonprofit coalition of universities, hospitals, government agencies and other nonprofits providing internet-based technology for its member institutions, has helped provide a dedicated high-speed connection between URI and the center more than 70 miles away.

Aside from the higher computing power, access to the center can pay off for URI in another way: proximity to world-class researchers from institutions such as Harvard and MIT. In many cases, faculty from various universities are working on similar projects, and the center can be a “collaborative playground” where there’s a benefit to sharing information and resources rather than competing for them, Khanna says.

Yes, competitiveness and rivalries still exist among some researchers, but the center “is an attempt

POWER UP: Gaurav Khanna, director of research computing at the University of Rhode Island, stands inside the data center at Tyler Hall on URI’s Kingston campus in South Kingstown. The unversity has put an emphasis on improving its high-performance computing capabilities recently. PBN PHOTO/ELIZABETH GRAHAM to break that down,” he said. “The main goal is to foster collaboration.” John Goodhue, executive director at Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center, says the computers at the facility serve more than 20,000 researchers, educators and students, and he adds that he wants to help make high-performance computing available to smaller and midsize institutions as well. In recent years, URI has placed heavy emphasis on bolstering its research computing capabilities. The university formed an Information Technology Research Computing Services team in 2020, and Khanna joined URI in early 2021 as its first director of research computing. URI says it will be adding several graduate assistants and a computational scientist to the IT Research Computing team in the fall. Khanna says the scientist will be tasked with showing researchers across the university how the high-performance computing now available to them can be used to improve their work. “It’s one thing to have this computational infrastructure,” he said. “It’s another thing to get people to use it. A large class of problems can be solved with computers.” For his part, Khanna currently has URI astrophysics students studying what happens when two black holes smash together. But there are also uses for the advanced computing that have applications closer to home, including the engineering work at URI to develop materials such as metals for naval use. Using computer modeling can save time and money. “It can be very expensive to keep destroying the materials” during testing, Khanna said. And there’s the development of computer models to predict the effects of storm surges along the coast in southern New England. Khanna says the high‘A large class of performance computing allows for more resolution than any provided by the National Weather Service, down to risks that particular streets and problems individual properties might face in particular scenarios. In addition, URI’s advanced computer power can be solved permits the use of machine learning, in which the models can become more accurate at predicting outcomes without being programmed by researchers. with computers.’ “It’s a very significant project to our region,” Khanna said. n

GAURAV KHANNA, University of Rhode Island director of research computing and physics professor