Eller MIS Faculty Wins 2026 POMS CHOM Best Paper Award
Seokjun Youn, assistant professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) at the Eller College of Management, won the 2026 Best Paper Award from the Production and Operations Management Society’s College of Healthcare Operations Management (POMS CHOM). The award was announced on May 9, 2026, at the POMS Annual Conference in Reno, Nevada.
Youn’s research spans healthcare operations management, platform economics and causal inference. He serves as associate editor at Decision Support Systems and on the editorial review boards of Production and Operations Management and Decision Sciences Journal. He joined Eller in 2019 and was recently confirmed for promotion to tenure effective in the 2026-2027 academic year.
The winning paper, "When Less Testing Costs More: Diagnostic Underuse Variation and Care-Delivery Expenditures in Hospital Operations," is co-authored with Gregory R. Heim, a professor at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School.
This year’s competition drew more than 40 submissions evaluated by a panel of 40 reviewers through a rigorous two-round process. After an initial screening, six semifinalist papers advanced to the final round, and four finalists were invited to present their work at the conference.
The paper addresses a costly but understudied source of waste in U.S. healthcare: variation in under-ordering diagnostic tests. While roughly a quarter of U.S. healthcare spending is widely estimated to be waste, policy attention has focused almost exclusively on overuse of services. Using a six-year panel of more than one million Medicare inpatient records from 387 hospitals across New York and Florida, the authors show that the opposite problem—inconsistent under-testing—carries a substantial and largely hidden cost penalty.
The study offers implications for hospital administrators and policymakers alike. The authors argue that value-based payment programs, which currently reward reductions in unnecessary services, should also penalize unwarranted underuse variation, and they recommend that hospitals invest in audit-and-feedback systems, embedded decision support and organizational learning initiatives to reduce diagnostic inconsistency.
At the same conference, Youn was also recognized by POMS for his service as co-chair of the Healthcare Analytics Track at the 36th POMS Annual Conference, an appointment he held jointly with Vikram Tiwari, a professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In this role, the co-chairs orchestrated 102 presentations across 28 sessions, making Healthcare Analytics one of the largest and most active tracks at the conference.
“This recognition is especially meaningful because it reflects both the research and service dimensions of the POMS community,” Youn said. “Our study shows that cost containment should not simply mean fewer tests. The goal is diagnostic reliability, ordering the right test for the right patient at the right time, so hospitals can avoid preventable downstream escalation. Serving as Healthcare Analytics Track Chair also gave me the opportunity to help bring together scholars using data and analytics to improve healthcare delivery.”