About

Ravi Bapna is the Curtis L. Carlson Chair Professor in Business Analytics and Information Systems and serves as the Academic Director of the Carlson Analytics Lab at the Carlson School of Management. He is closely affiliated with the MS in Business Analytics program and the Carlson Analytics Lab, where graduate students study a broad range of data analysis techniques and apply them to real business problems. These students are skilled in exploratory data visualization, predictive analytics, programming, data engineering, machine learning methods, and more, emerging as data science professionals. Partner organizations have the opportunity to work with these talented students while supporting the educational mission of the programs. The faculty involved with the Analytics for Good Institute, including Professor Bapna, bring expertise from across the Carlson School and beyond, including fields such as computer science, econometrics, strategy, and causal experimentation. The institute emphasizes impact, engagement, and collaboration with partner organizations to leverage analytics for social good.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Business
• Psychology
• Nursing
• Social psychology
• Internal medicine
• Accounting
• Virology
• Medical emergency

Selected publications

• Programming Tasks Impact Responses to Moral Dilemmas for Novice Programmers

  Information Systems Research · 2025-10-15

  articleSenior author

  The rapid diffusion of programming skills across education and industry may impact how individuals consider moral dilemmas. Across a series of experiments, we show that performing even simple programming tasks shifts novice programmers’ evaluation of the classic trolley problem toward utilitarian responses. After solving a programming problem, respondents are more willing to sacrifice one life to save many. This effect arises because programming induces a deliberative, rule-based cognitive style. However, the effect diminishes with greater programming experience and can be mitigated through interventions, such as time delays or moral nudges. These findings highlight that organizations training employees in coding should be aware that programming tasks may temporarily alter moral reasoning, potentially influencing judgments in ethically charged contexts (e.g., product design, risk management, or AI development). Incorporating reflective cooling-off periods or explicit ethical reinforcement may reduce bias toward utilitarian reasoning. As programming becomes a baseline skill across the workforce, its cognitive spillovers could shape societal attitudes toward contested moral dilemmas. These include ethical trade-offs in settings such as autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence systems.

  PublisherDOI

• Influence of Twitter on Medication Prescriptions

  Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Social media is playing a critical role in the dissemination of health information, and anecdotal evidence suggests it is influencing the perceptions of healthcare providers.To understand the influence of social media on healthcare providers' clinical decisions, we examine the influence of Twitter discourse regarding Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for treating COVID-19 patients on the proportion of HCQ prescriptions prescribed for COVID-19 patients in the USA in 2020.We collected Twitter data from Twitter API v2 and HCQ prescriptions in the USA from Symphony Health data on the COVID-19 research database.Econometric analysis of our data indicates that Twitter discourse has a positive influence on the HCQ prescriptions prescribed in the USA in 2020.Our results are robust to timeinvariant location-specific metrics.We discuss the possible pathways through which Twitter could have influenced healthcare providers' prescribing decisions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Programming Impacts Responses to Moral Dilemmas

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Do Electronic Health Record Systems Increase Medicare Reimbursements? The Moderating Effect of the Recovery Audit Program

  Management Science · 2021 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Medical emergency
  • Medicine
  • Business

  Electronic health record (EHR) systems allow physicians to automate the process of entering patient data relative to manual entry in traditional paper-based records. However, such automated data entry can lead to increased reimbursement requests by hospitals from Medicare by overstating the complexity of patients. The EHR module that has been alleged to increase reimbursements is the Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system, which populates patient charts with default templates and allows physicians to copy and paste data from previous charts of the patient and other patients’ records. To combat increased reimbursements by hospitals from Medicare, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services implemented the Recovery Audit Program first as a pilot in six states between 2005 and 2009 and then, nationwide in the entire United States in 2010. We examine whether the adoption of CPOE systems by hospitals is associated with an increase in reported patient complexity and if the Recovery Audit Program helped to attenuate this relationship. We find that the adoption of CPOE systems significantly increases patient complexity reported by hospitals, corresponding to an estimate of $1 billion increase in Medicare reimbursements per year. This increase was attenuated when hospitals were regulated by the Recovery Audit Program. Notably, those recovery auditors who developed the ability to identify the use of default templates, copied and pasted data, and cloned records were the most effective in reducing increased reimbursements. These findings have implications on how to combat Medicare reimbursements paid by taxpayer dollars with the Recovery Audit Program and how this information technology (IT) audit can prevent the misuse of information systems to create artificial business value of IT by hospitals. Contributions to information systems and healthcare research, practice, and public policy are discussed. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Telemedicine Transcend Disparities or Create a Digital Divide? Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 12 citations

  • Political Science
  • Medicine
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Decision Support Systems in Attenuating Racial Biases in Healthcare Delivery

  Management Science · 2020 · 76 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Medicine

  Although significant research has examined how technology can intensify racial and other outgroup biases, limited work has investigated the role information systems can play in abating them. Racial biases are particularly worrisome in healthcare, where underrepresented minorities suffer disparities in access to care, quality of care, and clinical outcomes. In this paper, we examine the role clinical decision support systems (CDSS) play in attenuating systematic biases among black patients, relative to white patients, in rates of amputation and revascularization stemming from diabetes mellitus. Using a panel of inpatient data and a difference-in-difference approach, results suggest that CDSS adoption significantly shrinks disparities in amputation rates across white and black patients—with no evidence that this change is simply delaying eventual amputations. Results suggest that this effect is driven by changes in treatment care protocols that match patients to appropriate specialists, rather than altering within physician decision making. These findings highlight the role information systems and digitized patient care can play in promoting unbiased decision making by structuring and standardizing care procedures. This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management.

  PublisherDOI

• How Does the Implementation of Enterprise Information Systems Affect a Professional’s Mobility? An Empirical Study

  Information Systems Research · 2019-06-01 · 29 citations

  article

  Although significant research has examined the effect of enterprise information systems on the behavior and careers of employees, the majority of this work has been devoted to the study of blue- and gray-collar workers, with little attention paid to the transformative effect information technology may have on high-status professionals. In this paper, we begin to bridge this gap by examining how highly skilled professionals react to the increasing presence of enterprise systems within their organizations. Specifically, we investigate how the implementation of enterprise systems—in the form of electronic health records—affects the decision of physicians to continue practicing at their current hospital. Results suggest that when enterprise systems create complementarities for professionals, their duration of practice at the organization increases significantly. However, when technologies are disruptive and force professionals to alter their routines, there is a pronounced exodus from the organization. Interestingly, these effects are strongly moderated by individual and organizational characteristics, such as the degree of firm-specific human capital, local competition, and the prevalence of past disruptions, but are not associated with accelerated retirement or the strategic poaching of talent by competing organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Decision Support Systems in Attenuating Racial Biases in Healthcare Delivery

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Just What the Doctor Ordered? Physician Mobility After the Adoption of Electronic Health Records

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2017-08-01 · 2 citations

  article

  Although significant research has examined the effect of enterprise information systems on the behavior and careers of employees, the majority of this work has been devoted to the study of blue and grey collar workers, with little attention paid to the transformative effect IT may have on high status professionals. In this paper, we begin to bridge this gap by examining how highly skilled professionals react to the increasing presence of technology within their organizations. Specifically, we investigate how the implementation of electronic health record systems (EHRs) affects physician mobility and the decision to continue practicing at their current hospital. Results from a census of physicians in the state of Florida suggest that when these enterprise systems create complementarities for the physician, their tenure at the focal organization increases significantly. However, when technologies are disruptive to the physician’s routines, there is a pronounced exodus from the organization. Interestingly, despite recent claims, results do not suggest that such technology adoption is associated with accelerated retirement on the part of physicians or strategic poaching of talent on the part of competing hospitals. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed within.

  PublisherDOI

• 'Where to, Doc?' Electronic Health Record Systems and the Mobility of Chronic Care Patients

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hilal Atasoy

  17 shared

• Paul A. Pavlou

  University of Miami

  15 shared

• Brad N. Greenwood

  George Mason University

  6 shared

• Rajiv D. Banker

  5 shared

• Corey M. Angst

  University of Notre Dame

  3 shared

• Pei‐Yu Chen

  2 shared

• Jeffrey S. McCullough

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  2 shared

• Pei‐Yu Chen

  Chung Shan Medical University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Gordon B. Davis young scholar award by the Information Syste…