Almost 100 students initially registered for the competition; they then formed approximately 15 teams to compete in the first-round elimination. The finalists included seven teams of mostly graduate students, from a variety of disciplines across Georgia Tech.

The two winning teams – Na’Vi and Brew Crew – were composed of students from Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics program, which is housed in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering. Team Na’Vi included Harshit Amya, Rishi Bhatia, Arjun Mishra, and Vyom Vats. Na’Vi won first place and was awarded $8,000. Team Brew Crew included Parit Burintrathikul, Aaron D’Souza, Abhishek Khare, and Rishab Parashar. Brew Crew won second place and was awarded $5,000. Both teams received tickets to the Southern Data Science Conference, held April 7, 2017, in Atlanta, Ga.

The Master Modeler Competition was sponsored by Navicure. Serving more than 100,000 providers nationwide, Navicure is a provider of cloud-based claims management and patient payment solutions that enable health care organizations of all sizes to increase revenue, accelerate cash flow, and reduce the cost and effort of managing claims, patient billing and payments, and health care data analytics. 

Team Na’Vi and Team Brew Crew developed solutions to help Navicure better understand the payments processing and business side of health care services. Their insights and models will provide the head of data science and other executives at Navicure with different perspectives on how to leverage their data to improve patient experience as well as physician office efficiency.