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.

Description: Data is everywhere. Health care generates as much as 30% of the world’s data, and new technologies are changing how life insurers analyze consumer information. Actuaries are business-savvy problem solvers. They understand how to leverage the latest technologies and techniques to turn data into actionable insights and solutions for businesses and can communicate those findings to multiple audiences. SOA-credentialed actuaries use predictive analytics to inform organizational and business strategies, with efforts such as identifying chronic conditions in their early stage or determining stress levels through sweat patterns.

Description: After a decade of traditional actuarial work in health care, David Sotelo was seeking a new kind of opportunity to make an impact. He found it at Collective Health, where he works with a team of actuaries and data scientists that use analytics to streamline health insurance.

Description: Career changes typically follow a major milestone—a promotion, a job offer, a new degree, maybe a cross-country move. For Patrick Getzen, exposure to some new perspectives ignited a shift.

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: The SOA continues to support actuaries working with predictive analytics, from insurance companies and healthcare providers to financial service firms.

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: 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.