I immigrated from Vietnam to the United States when I was seven years old, and so many of my opportunities have come from U.S. policies, including free public education. When I graduated high school and enrolled at Northwestern University, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. But as a first-generation college student, I did know I had to do two things: be willing to hustle for every opportunity and to ask for help.
At Northwestern, I had a good friend who was in communications studies. I’ve always been very extroverted, and the idea of studying the multistep process of communication and how people interact with each other piqued my interest. My communications background has had a profound impact on most of my career, because so much of what I do now is about building bridges between two sides of a problem. That’s really what innovation is: hearing what different people are communicating and finding a solution.
While I was doing my undergraduate work, I took an internship writing job descriptions and was offered a job as a recruiter at graduation. We got a big contract and went from 10 open positions to 40 overnight. It was too much for one person to manage, so they created a recruitment team. This gave me the opportunity to transition to a more general role. I helped implement our new HR information system, but realized that I didn’t want to be in HR for the rest of my life—I wanted to be in tech. I was able to move into the IT department of that company and I loved it. During one outage, our team worked for 48 hours straight. I went home, literally dreamed of a solution that we ended up trying out—and it worked. I’m always trying to figure out how to solve problems and reminding myself to look at things from other points of view.
Later, I was offered an opportunity to work for a larger organization as its help desk administrator, and applied to DePaul University for graduate school to strengthen my skills. My company was willing to pay for it, but the program would have taken four years to complete while working. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do things with your full attention, so I enrolled at DePaul full time and earned a master’s degree in information systems. Afterward, I worked in business intelligence consulting for five years, on data warehouses, customer relationship management, and managed reporting environments.
My entry into health care came when a former colleague reached out to me to work in their data governance program at Health Care Service Corporation (BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas). When the Affordable Care Act passed, I was tasked with developing our information strategy to address the new requirements of the ACA marketplace. Once, I gave a lecture to a group of health care analytics folks and asked who had read the legislation—not a single hand went up. This was a fundamental shift in our ecosystem, and I read it end to end, because the way that data could impact healthcare was about to fundamentally change. While most in the industry understood there were new compliance requirements, what they didn’t seem to grasp was that the scales were being tipped toward data as a driver in health care.
As a management consultant, I helped companies develop strategies for value-based care, which rewards health care that delivers better outcomes. I joined Mathematica because of the caliber of our people and the opportunity to innovate within the health data space. We’re great at doing research and at applying it to real-world problems—for example, we can use data to narrow the gaps in who receives care and how care is delivered. Our health data innovation lab gives provides a safe space for clients to access and the full force of our expertise, providing a conduit for innovation and problem solving.
I have three kids. My oldest is 19, my middle is 16, and my youngest is 12. And the advice that I give to them is that they have to evaluate the choices they have at any given moment and make the choice that feels right—without worrying too much about what that means long term—because you can’t predict the future. You have to be flexible and figure out what works. That’s a skill I bring to Mathematica, and I’m looking forward to continuing to innovate to help our clients figure out what works within the complexities of the healthcare data space.
