Lead Data Scientist (Healthcare)

Key Skills

Apache Hadoop, C Programming, C++, Data science techniques, Java Programming, Machine learning techniques, MapReduce, Python Programming, PyTorch, R Programming, Scala Programming, SQL, TensorFlow

Job Description

Our team is responsible for driving and optimizing Aetna’s member engagement strategy to lower medical cost. We do this by identifying the key decisions that our members make that are consequential to their health or what they pay for healthcare and then providing personalized information to them via omni-channel marketing to inform them of recommendations. Our team is highly entrepreneurial and creative, and we can identify our own topics for engagement. We work hand in hand with our colleagues in both marketing and data engineering (who in concert with we have built our own homegrown experimentation and channel delivery platform). We have great ability to engage with members, including the use of 10 different channels, rewards, apps, vendors, and personalized micro-sites. Think of us as an incubator or start up for creating novel interventions to improve healthcare for our members, with great ability and scale to do so.

On our team you will learn a lot about healthcare, how to engage customers using marketing and behavioral economics, experiment design and campaign optimization, and predictive modeling. We offer a unique ability to identify and design your own interventions and then measure and see their tangible impact. If you are looking to be able to use data science in a creative manner that drives very tangible impact, our team is it!

Examples of our work include:

• Reaching out to members who are being admitted preparing them for their hospital stay and upon discharge providing recommendations for proper care, to avoid subsequently being readmitted
• Reminding and rewarding members for taking medications prescribed to treat chronic disease
• Educating members on various treatment options for mental health
• Sending home A1C screening kits to members who have diabetes
• Educating members on cost effective and efficient treatment options for various diagnostic services like labs and radiology
• Lower colorectal cancer rates by predicting members who need screening and sending to them, for free, home colorectal cancer screening FIT kits.
• Educating women during pregnancy about available helpful resources (e.g. video doulas)
• Predicting members likely to seek care in an emergency room who could avoid a visit through primary care, and messaging them with recommendations to do so
• Predicting members likely to receive surgeries in recommending that they speak with their provider about both ways of potentially avoiding surgery through conservative treatment and efficient surgery treatment options.

Your Role

As a Principal Data Scientist, you’ll be a technical expert and mentor for our entire team of 55 data scientists and report directly to the AVP of Consumer Analytics. You will:

• Identify areas of work that are generalizable across our teams and lead efforts to build more centralized and scalable data science tools for them
• Identify areas that require better processes and lead efforts to develop best practices that our team can follow
• Be a technical mentor and expert and serve as a resource for teams at key points in the development of their projects (e.g. predictive modeling, measurement).
• Identify new data sources/streams that our team can benefit from and work with data engineering to make these accessible to our teams in a consumable manner
• Provide thought leadership and direction for analytic solutions, tools, and studies

Required Qualifications

• 7-10 or more years of progressively complex related experience