Dr. Hemant Jain serves as the W. Max Finley Chair in Business, Free Enterprise and Capitalism. Photo by Angela Foster.
At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, research is moving beyond the labs and classrooms to reach local communities, helping stakeholders better understand their needs and challenges.
In 2024, the Journey Health Foundation Research Center was established with a donation from the Journey Health Foundation. The center focuses on the health and welfare of residents in 27 counties across Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama.
Dr. Hemant Jain, director of the center and the MS Data Analytics Program in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business, explained that the center uses data analysis to identify the root causes of issues communities may be facing.
The center recently announced 10 projects in partnership with local nonprofits to address community needs.
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What is the Journey Health Foundation Research Center and its goals?
“Journey Health Foundation wants to use data analytics and our research to identify the areas that are most in need in terms of health and economic support. They support the research center in doing the research and analysis, and running analytics on the data to identify the root causes of some of the health and economic inequities in our areas to help them focus their funding decisions based on our research.”
Why did you want to be the center’s director?
“In the last 10 to 12 years, I’ve been focusing a lot of IT research related to healthcare. We have done a lot of research on providing healthcare in the virtual world and on many other topics. I’ve done some work in cancer care and breast cancer research, especially in data analysis. Data is extremely important in every field, especially in healthcare.
“With the social context that this opportunity had, we jumped on it because generally business schools don’t do this. Most of these organizations don’t come to business schools, but Journey Health has been a very forward-looking foundation. They have a business background, and I think they thought the business school had many innovative approaches. Our objective and goals are to try to pilot it in these areas and hopefully this will become a national model.”
Why specifically did healthcare interest you?
“The majority of our country’s budget goes to healthcare. We are still not providing the best possible healthcare in the world. It really is very intriguing: Why is that happening? Some of the reasons have been the inefficiencies in the systems. So merging the technology with healthcare can actually address this problem much better.
“As we are seeing more and more AI development happening in healthcare, I think healthcare is going to completely change in the next five years. It’s a very, very exciting area. I think that’s the area where AI is going to have the most impact. We are using a lot of AI in our work. We are generating reports that are extremely useful to the community and are shared with public officials, county and city mayors, researchers and nonprofits in our areas.”
Dr. Hemant Jain has published more than 100 scholarly Journal articles. His work has appeared in leading journals including Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Journal of MIS, IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics, Naval Research Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Communications of ACM and Information & Management.
What kind of projects and research do you see coming out of this center?
“We really want to pilot very innovative new ideas and to use the larger UTC faculty, not only related to the business college, but all colleges, and encourage faculty at UTC to work with the nonprofits in the area to have real impact on the community. We provided seed funding of approximately $25,000 each to 10 projects across many different areas.
“Some are related to 911 calls. Some are related to providing healthcare. Some are related to using the hairdressers to get the word out. So very, very out-of-the-box, innovative ideas. The different college faculty are working with the nonprofits they partnered with for this year-long project, and we are really excited to see the results coming out of these pilot projects.”
Is there anything you’re currently working on in terms of research?
“We’re working on many things. One of the things we are almost finishing up is a paper that identifies what we call ‘double-whammy’ communities in our area. They have very limited access to healthcare and live in food desert communities. We are identifying those communities through data analytics and then trying to identify their root causes.
“What we really discovered through the research is that just providing funding—which is what the federal government is doing—to open the stores in the food desert communities doesn’t really help because it doesn’t improve the conditions of the people there. The real reason is that the people in that community are sometimes too poor to buy food. So even though there is a grocery store, they cannot just go and buy the food. They need some additional help. They don’t have transportation to get there.
“Looking at the problem from just one point of view and solving, addressing one point of the problem doesn’t solve it. That’s the reason the center is really focused on root cause analysis. We divide the geographic area into census tracts and examine the population, age groups, income levels and educational levels in the tract. Based on that combination, we figure out what kind of help they need, then try to get the nonprofits to support that track.”
For students interested in this type of research, what would you suggest they do?
“We actually have an excellent program for the students in the center. We call it the Student Internship Program. We try to pair a student with a nonprofit in the area that interests them and the nonprofit. We target students from any college. It’s open right now.
“We are looking for students for about eight or nine internships that are open this fall with nonprofit organizations looking for help with data collection, data analysis, dashboard development and all kinds of things. We pay these students $1,000 for one semester, which will go toward their tuition or other expenses.
“It’s a great experience for the students. It exposes them to the nonprofit world. A lot of times, they get very interested in it and move further into that area. It’s great to see.”
Learn more
Journey Health Foundation Research Center
Gary W. Rollins College of Business
