Optimizing Health Plan Design

Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88, faculty

Young companies with MIT origins are leveraging data to improve human health in bold, creative ways. One of these is Benefits Science Technologies (BST), spun out of MIT in 2012. BST takes a three-pronged approach—descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics—to helping companies optimize their health plans in a way that benefits both employer and employee. BST analyzes complex data on companies’ current health care spending and provides insights on the efficacy of the health care plan. Then, it predicts employees’ future health care costs, and based on these predictions optimizes the design of the health plan. The company’s chief scientist is Bertsimas, who is the Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management and co-director of MIT’s Operations Research Center.