Baxter Healthcare wins the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Practice Award

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS-) today announced that Baxter Healthcare is the winner of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Practice Award.

The 2009 award was presented for "SPRINT: A Decision Analysis Based System for Prioritizing R&D Investments at Baxter Healthcare," by Phil Beccue of Baxter Healthcare and Chris Dalton of Syncopation Software.

"The Baxter submission excelled in both its scope and impact," said J. Eric Bickel, chair of the award committee and a professor of operations research and industrial engineering at the University of Texas Austin. "The testimonials regarding the benefits of decision analysis were truly exceptional."

Baxter invests nearly $1 billion annually on innovative science to develop specialty therapies and medical products. Baxter developed SPRINT to bring financial rigor and insights to the tradeoffs required in the company's global research and development decision making. As a portfolio system combining Excel spreadsheets and DPL decision analysis software, SPRINT captures technical and commercial uncertainty, and is based on an efficient web-based design to collect, manage, and analyze R&D data.

The INFORMS Decision Analysis Practice Award is given annually to the best decision analysis application, as judged by a panel of Society members. The intent of this award is to recognize, promote, and publicize good decision analysis practice. It includes a cash prize of $750 and assistance in getting the work published in a suitable journal such as Decision Analysis or Interfaces if the winner so desires. Previous publication of the work does not preclude it from consideration for this award.

The finalists also included "Decision Support for Patients at the UCSF Breast Care Center," by Jeff Belkora, Shelley Volz, Meredith Loth, and Alexandra Tang of the University of California San Francisco and "Modular Influence Diagrams and Warranty Cost Reduction" by Robert Bordley of General Motors.

The INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Practice Award was presented last month at the INFORMS annual meeting, which took place in San Diego. More than 4,000 professionals and academics attended the annual conference.