Capstone Projects

A Visual Business Intelligence Tool for Effectively Managing Investigator Capacity

Program: Data Science Master's
Host Company: Cigna
Location: Chattanooga, Tennessee (onsite)
Student: Tom Runkle

This paper is a review of a client-based project for the Special Investigations Unit of a large health insurance company which currently receives more potential fraud cases to investigate than available capacity. Information regarding case throughput and investigator capacity is not readily available to management. Without this information, it is difficult to make process or efficiency improvements. The goal of the project was to provide greater visibility into relevant key metrics that may influence the amount of time investigations take to complete. This was accomplished by the development of a visual business intelligence tool. As a first step, relevant case data were gathered and cleaned. Descriptive statistics were studied and exploratory visual analysis was performed to find data points that would prove useful for managing case throughput. This information was used to create visualizations of the data. These visualizations were assembled and formatted to create dynamic online dashboards that management can use to digest a large amount of information with relatively little effort. Having this information at their fingertips will assist them in generating new insights into the efficiency of their teams and more effective management of available capacity.