INFORMS Presents Ramsey Medal to Healthcare Financial Analytics Executive Don Kleinmuntz

Dr. Don Kleinmuntz

HANOVER, MD, December 14, 2011 – The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®) today announced the award of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Frank P. Ramsey Medal to Dr. Don N. Kleinmuntz, President and co-founder of Strata Decision Technology, a market leading provider of web-based financial analytics and performance management software tools used primarily by U.S. hospitals and health systems to enhance their financial planning, budgeting, and reporting processes.

The Ramsey Medal is awarded for outstanding contributions to decision analysis in academic accomplishment, business practice, or community service. The INFORMS Decision Analysis Society recognized Dr. Kleinmuntz for his accomplishments in all three areas.

Professor James S. Dyer of the University of Texas Austin, who presented the award, said, “Typically a Ramsey Medal winner is exceptional in terms of academic contributions to Decision Analysis, applications of Decision Analysis, or service to the Decision Analysis Society. Don is remarkable because of such strong contributions in all three areas.”

Dr. Kleinmuntz’s academic credentials include faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USC, MIT, and the University of Texas at Austin, during an academic career marked by numerous contributions to prescriptive and descriptive decision analysis.

Professionally, Dr. Kleinmuntz focuses on developing advanced analytics methods and approaches to improve business decision making and financial analysis. Together with his wife, Dr. Catherine Kleinmuntz, he started Strata Decision Technology, a company that provides software to over 800 hospitals and thousands of hospital-affiliated healthcare provider organizations. He has consulted on decision processes and decision analysis applications with a wide variety of corporations, professional service firms, hospitals, healthcare systems, and government agencies at both the state and federal level.

With a goal of service to his field, he was elected a member of the INFORMS Board three times, serving a total of seven years including a term as 2009 President of INFORMS, helped start the INFORMS journal Decision Analysis, which he co-edited; and has served as an officer of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society. In 2007, he received the INFORMS Fellow Award.

The Ramsey Medal was named in memory of Frank Plumpton Ramsey, a British mathematician who made fundamental contributions to decision theory prior to his death in 1930 at the tragically early age of 26.

Dr. Kleinmuntz received the Ramsey Medal at the INFORMS annual meeting in Charlotte on November 13.

About INFORMS

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. INFORMS serves the scientific and professional needs of operations research analysts, experts in analytics, consultants, scientists, students, educators, and managers, as well as their institutions, by publishing a variety of journals that describe the latest research in operations research, organizing academic and professional conferences, and providing a range of other services. INFORMS Online (IOL) is at www.informs.org. Further information about operations research can be found at www.scienceofbetter.org.

About Strata Decision Technology

Strata Decision Technology, based in Chicago, is a pioneer in the development of innovative software tools for financial and business analytics in the U.S. healthcare industry. Since its founding in 1996, Strata Decision Technology has become a trusted technology partner to leading hospitals, academic medical centers, and healthcare systems. Strata Decision Technology's unique approach combines sophisticated financial analytics with a flexible, highly configurable platform that enhances collaboration, coordinates plans and strategies, and communicates with non-financial audiences. The company's website can be found at www.stratadecision.com.

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