I first discovered my passion for research in high school, thanks to a unique partnership between my public school in southern New Jersey and a local university. I spent time in the university’s toxicology lab and quickly realized that the way science is typically taught in school—as if it is a series of predetermined truths and facts—is not the way science works in real life. Science is about discovering the unknown— building evidence experiment by experiment to eventually lead to more meaningful discoveries. This experience initially led me to consider a career in the physical sciences, but during my sophomore year of college, I discovered I had a deeper interest in how people understand science and how we build programs and policies to support science and technology. This steered me toward an interest in public policy, where I first discovered Mathematica’s work. I first read about Mathematica’s work evaluating education programs and was so impressed by both the scale of the data collection and the core concept that decisions about public programs could be derived from a rigorous evidence-based approach.
I was drawn to Mathematica early in my college years, but what many of my colleagues might not know is that when I first applied, I didn’t even get an interview. I remained persistent because I believed in the organization’s mission and wanted to make a significant impact. When I didn’t land that first interview in my early twenties, I spent a year as a research assistant in an autism lab at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School—Rutgers University. But I never let go of my goal to work at Mathematica. The limited scope of lab research couldn’t compare with the exciting prospect of working with millions of health care claim records or data from thousands of student surveys. That’s why I applied a second time—and why I’m still here more than 13 years later, committed to supporting Mathematica’s mission of improving public well-being.
What’s lost sometimes when we talk about being a mission-driven organization is that Mathematica’s mission is reflected in our staff. How we dedicate our time, how we approach dialogue with clients and communities, our humility, and why we want to help our clients make real life impacts to improve public well-being.
I have the privilege of leading Mathematica’s private sector work in health—working with the life sciences and med tech industry, health systems and providers, entities that bear financial risk in health care, and medical societies, associations, and colleges.
Mathematica has a strong record in health care research and advisory services, where our work informs how to design and improve real world programs and policies that affect tens of millions of people. This concept of generating real-world evidence dates to Mathematica’s founding and so it was a natural extension of our work to contribute to real-world evidence studies for life sciences and medical device firms. The emergence of this portfolio has enabled our staff to contribute to topics in vaccine equity and disease burden across different therapeutic areas. Core to our success has been a steadfast commitment to using the best available data and rigorous methods to generate real world insights.
Another part of my group’s work has been focused on improving price transparency within health care. This is a key mission-centric offering that focuses on the democratization of data. When we shop for virtually any item—home goods, real estate, entertainment, and so on—prices are transparent. You know what you’re purchasing, and you know its price. It’s only in health care that you discover the price after using the service. Imagine going into Target and not knowing the price of an item until after you swipe your credit card. That’s what health care is like today across the United States and how it’s been for decades. To change this, we will need to improve consumer access to and understanding of price data.
In July 2022, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began to require all commercial payers (companies that provide health insurance plans to individuals and employers) to publicly disclose their negotiated rates with health care providers for many covered services. Payers complied—sort of. The data was made available, but payers made that data pretty much impossible to understand unless you have a Ph.D. in data science. Mathematica saw an opportunity to make price transparency data more accessible and enable this fundamental transformation in how health care is purchased by consumers and negotiated by the provider community.
One of the first clients to take advantage of our price transparency suite was a large regional health system, Maine Health. Our tool helped them understand their own performance against peers allowing for point-in time and trend comparisons ultimately enabling decision makers at the health system to use evidence to support business operations and control cost in a targeted way.
I often hear from our private sector clients that our project teams consist of the nicest people they have worked with in their careers. I like to think they feel that way because our mission attracts a certain kind of person. Here at Mathematica, we believe in what we do, and we’re dedicated to doing it well. That’s core to who we are, how we sell our services, and how we deliver. And yes, we have a lot of nice people that work here as well.
