About
Benjamin Grant is an assistant professor in the Department of Management at Clemson University’s Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in quantitative analytics from the University of Cincinnati. He then went on to earn his Ph.D. in operations management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Grant’s research is focused on health care operations management from a lens of value-based care and health care disparity reduction. He uses tools from operations management, applied statistics, algorithms, data science, simulation and mathematical modeling. His research has appeared in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM), one of the best operations management journals, and he is often invited to present at leading international conferences.
Visit Dr. Grant's Department Profile.
How their research is transforming health care
Grant’s research focuses on analytical modeling of decision making with applications to health care. He and his team examine the scheduling decision of early follow-up visits for heart failure patients who have been recently discharged from a hospitalization. When the follow-up clinic appointment schedule is full, there is a trade-off between delaying a follow-up appointment at the risk of a costly health failure (such as readmission or mortality) or overscheduling the clinic and incurring higher costs for overtime. The team mathematically models the scheduling decision for the preventative follow-up appointment, which aims to reduce the risk of costly failures. They use dynamic programming, Markov decision processes and numerical experiments to gain insights into the impact of the scheduling decision. The team shows that simple scheduling policies are often optimal and presents recommendations for practical implementations of their findings. His current research looks more broadly at the health care system and incorporates data directly into the modeling of patient-centered networks of care.
Health Research Expertise Keywords
Faculty Scholar, Value-based healthcare, health and healthcare equity, disparities in healthcare, healthcare operations management, systems science, simulation modeling, analytical healthcare modeling, patient pathway analysis, care integration, predictive modeling, decision support through data analytics
