Smith MBAs Capture Cognizant Consulting Competition

A team of MBA students from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business developed and presented a health care management solution to capture the fourth annual Cognizant Business Consulting Case Competition.

The Smith MBA Consulting Club hosted the competition’s final round in Van Munching Hall on October 16-17, 2015.

Cognizant, a NASDAQ-100 provider of information technology, consulting and business process outsourcing services, challenged the competing teams to solve a health care, insurance or IT issue by creating a competitive advantage via “Code Halos,” also referred to as “digital footprints.” The Smith team, Fletcher McCraw, Bill Fegan, Gabrielle Kuey and Anna Holland (also a UMD public policy student and Peace Corps recruiter for UMD’s Career Center and The President's Promise Staff), developed and presented a predictive patient performance model as a tool for hospitals to maximize revenue opportunities associated with at-risk contracts.

Leaders from Cognizant judged the finals and awarded the Smith students the $4,000 top prize.

The other teams represented Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, NYU Stern School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, Boston University School of Management, Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, University of Texas McCombs School of Business, University of Minnesota Carlson School Management, USC Marshall School of Business, University of Michigan Ross School of Business and UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

McCraw credited Smith experts “for providing feedback along the way.” Participating advisors included Kenyon Crowley, deputy director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS); Charles Olson, professor of the practice and director of the Business Honors Program;  Protiti Dastidar, associate department chair and Tyser Teaching Fellow in the Department of Management and Organization; and Stephen Manti, MBA ’15 -- a Cognizant senior consultant and former CHIDS graduate assistant.

“We incorporated feedback about proactive outreach with SMS messaging and development costs,” he says. “These two points proved to be extremely valuable and set us apart from the other schools.”

The Smith team, moreover, incorporated “a lot of what we learned from the [MBA] program,” says McCraw, including “many concepts we learned through a ‘New Product Development’ class and an NPV (Net Present Value) analysis through Intro to Finance.”