When Data Meets Healthcare: Ross MBAn Students’ Mission to Help Patients Stay on Track

The business challenge

DirectRx, an independent specialty pharmacy located in Troy, Michigan, was looking to solve a problem. Like many pharmacies, they were exploring ways to improve medication refill adherence, a term that refers to how consistently a patient obtains refills of their prescribed medications. Adherence is important to pharmacies because it can indicate whether patients take their medication as directed.

Their goal wasn’t just to increase that rate; they wanted to understand it and create a detailed plan with actionable solutions that would continue to improve overall adherence over time.

To make that happen, DirectRx turned to Michigan Ross.

As part of their capstone action-based learning course, known as the Consulting Studio project, five students from the Master of Business Analytics Program were selected to tackle this problem for DirectRx. The student team included Lindsey Bellowe, MBAn ’25; Michael Rego, MBAn ’25; Yin Shen, MBAn ’25; Julia Spilkin, MBAn ’25; and Chong Zhu, MBan ’25.

A full-circle moment for Ross alums

The Consulting Studio is part of a group of Michigan Ross action-based, learning-focused experiences that also include Multidisciplinary Action Projects. These courses allow students to apply the skills and frameworks they've learned in the classroom to real-world business challenges, gaining work experience while offering fresh perspectives to sponsoring companies.

With multiple Michigan Ross alums helping lead the team at DirectRx, sponsoring a project was a no-brainer. 

“The president of our company did his Weekend MBA at Ross, so he had completed a MAP project there, had a great experience, and wanted to be able to see the other side of that as a sponsor,” said Sydney Sailor, MM ’24, who served as the DirectRx point of contact for the project.

As a Michigan Ross Master of Management alum, Sailor, who leads a team of revenue cycle analysts at DirectRx, was also excited to work with the students on the project.

“I loved my experience at Ross, and to be able to fill the role of a project sponsor really solidified for me that my connection to Michigan will never disappear,” she said. 

Turning data into impact

Over the course of the 14-week DirectRx Consulting Studio project, Sailor and her team tasked the MBAn students with developing a predictive model to accurately forecast medication refill adherence rates for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients.

The students began by researching how competitors in the pharmaceutical industry use data analytics. Using patient data, they created a new system to predict which patients were less likely to stay on their medication regimen and then suggested specific, proactive actions to help them stay on track.

Sailor says the project was a major success, delivering valuable data-driven recommendations that were already helping the company shift from a reactive to a more proactive approach to medication adherence.

“The best thing that I hope the students got from this is that they were really making a difference in some of these patients’ lives. Helping patients become more adherent will significantly improve their treatment,” Sailor said. “We are already thinking about what we could do next year for another project.”

Lessons learned beyond the classroom

The students also gained meaningful experience participating in the project and were grateful for the lessons that they could carry with them into their careers.

“This experience was an incredible opportunity to apply everything that I learned in the MBAn Program to solve a real company’s business challenges before fully entering the working world,” said Lindsey Bellowe, MBAn ’25. “The most important lesson that I learned is that open and honest communication leads to the best outcomes. Whether I was talking through an idea with my faculty advisors, discussing project progress with our DirectRx liaison, or dividing responsibilities amongst my team, working through challenges was much easier when we worked together and communicated.”

“Our biweekly meetings with the sponsor gave us real-time guidance and feedback, setting our project up for great success,” Michael Rego, MBAn ’25, added. “DirectRx was both informative and had a hands-off approach, allowing us to navigate the problem independently, which I think significantly improved our individual learning experiences, as we all had different methods for both the strategy and the process.”

As the students apply what they’ve learned to their careers after graduation, DirectRx is also putting their findings into action and looking ahead. Pleased with the results, the company is excited about the possibility of sponsoring another Consulting Studio project next year.

As a project sponsor, Sailor encouraged other growing companies to take advantage of the resources available to them through Michigan Ross.

“If you have a project that needs to be done and it’s something that would be impactful for students to learn from, don't shy away from at least submitting a proposal. We've had multiple meetings about the findings from our project, and these amazing results that are going to be implemented right away at our pharmacy,” she said. 

“I think that was a great connection for both our company and the students because it was real. This is all tangible, all that they worked on with us. And I think that all the students were so driven from the start, but I was really impressed with how much they were committed to the outcome.”