Description: question and look for ways to make improvements on things by making them more efficient and intuitive. Mehmud did not study actuarial science in school. He earned a degree in mathematics and physics while taking courses like Asian history and skeptical thinking. In retrospect, he said, his exposure to a liberal arts education allowed him to view problems with a multifaceted perspective.

Description: Twenty years ago Steve Tutewohl’s clients were taking bold risks with limited information, little analytical support and hardly any data. As an actuary working on the provider side, Tutewohl started out in a traditional role in an untraditional environment. In his early years at Valence Health he was focused on educating, informing and bringing knowledge to providers so they could level the playing field with payers when they were negotiating and managing risks. Today Tutewohl’s clients have “data that is above and beyond what the payer has.”

Description: A drive to push through the fear of failure is one of the traits that separates successful entrepreneurs from the pack. And as Nazir Valani learned early in his career, that drive is especially important when doubts come from people he looked to for encouragement.

Description: Carol McCall led three teams – predictive analytics, health economics and outcomes research, and personalized medicine. The “river running through them” was that they all leveraged data. Her predictive analytics team eventually built a broad portfolio of models with some of them having a significant impact on Humana’s top and bottom lines.

Description: If anyone is a paradigm of the notion that learning never stops, it’s Head of Actuarial Modeling and Experience Study for Munich RE Winnie Liu. Winnie set her sights on new horizons after almost 20 years in the insurance industry. Her interest in cutting-edge predictive analytics had been budding for years, and in 2017, she set out to earn her Predictive Analytics (PA) Certificate from the Society of Actuaries (SOA).

Description: Lillian Dittrick’s strategic analytics team at UnityPoint Health® has developed an application to automatically cull unstructured doctors’ notes in electronic medical records. Dittrick’s team is part of a strategic analytics department that did not exist three years ago. UnityPoint Health®, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems, has assembled a team of people who use advanced analytics to build more complete patient risk stratification models by mining claims, clinical and social determinant data in new ways.