What's your role at Ursa Health, and what do you do?
My role is that of a Data Integration Engineer, so the bulk of the work I do is wrangling the data that different health insurance payors send to our clients, conforming all the disparate sources into our Core Data Model in Ursa Studio. In the few months that I've worked here so far, one of my biggest takeaways has been how much of a "Wild West" data environment the healthcare industry has, with a large amount of heterogeneity across different payors and organizations. There are a lot of really interesting nuances to decipher and problems to solve along the way of fully understanding the different flavors of claims package data that we help our clients integrate.
Can you share a little about your background?
I grew up in Wisconsin and went to school in Madison before moving to Chicago, where I've now lived for almost nine years. Up until joining Ursa, I had spent my whole career in technology consulting, working to help organizations build various analytics solutions and web applications. The majority of the projects I worked on focused on the data integration and data warehousing side of things, and then in more recent years, I'd gotten to work on some front-end and API development projects as well.
I never really lived the whole Monday through Thursday consulting travel schedule, but I did get quite lucky with the workplaces I did get to travel to. Before 2020, I worked onsite for client projects in Colorado, Hong Kong, and New York. In recent years, though, I'd say I've definitely settled into the more remote-first style of work.
The types of clients I worked with spanned a pretty wide array of industries, from large financial and insurance institutions to mid-size retailers and manufacturers to smaller tech startups. One of the organizations I worked with over the course of two years was a regional health insurance payor. Our team helped build out their data warehouse across a few different projects to create a more accurate historical view of their claims data, automate their accounts receivable process, enable easier CMS compliance reporting, and various other efforts. It was my first experience with healthcare data, and after two years of becoming an expert in their system and their data, I naively thought to myself—oh yeah, I think I understand healthcare data. Fast-forward to now, I've come to realize that the more I learn about healthcare and the data that it generates, the more there is to learn!
Why did you decide to work for Ursa Health?
During my time working in technology consulting, I had a range of experiences working in diverse industries and was able to connect some dots between the types of problems that different organizations have with their data and applications, but over time I started to feel ready to focus more on one area to develop some depth of industry expertise rather than additional breadth. I had an interest in getting back into the healthcare data space because there are a lot of complicated problems to solve, and there's ultimately an opportunity to tie this kind of work back to better outcomes for patients.
My first introduction to the Ursa platform before the interviewing process was with Aaron (Ursa’s CIO) showing me a demo of a couple different analyses that were able to be done with the software. I could tell it was quite a bit more sophisticated than the types of analytics solutions that I had typically worked with before, and that piqued by interest to get some deeper experience with it.
What do you find to be the best part about working with Ursa Health?
I like that everyone I work with is an expert in what they do. I'm relatively new to the healthcare industry as a whole, so it's been great to be able to absorb as much new information as possible from the folks around me who have learned the ins and outs of it over the years. I also really like that it's a team where everyone is willing to lend a hand, whether it's for a new employee joining and needing a bit of guidance or for a specific question on a client project.
What is the one thing people are surprised to learn about you?
I'm really interested in architecture and interior / furniture design. Over the past couple years, I've designed ten or so different pieces of furniture and storage solutions around my apartment, either building them myself or working with someone to get them built. It's kind of a wild and gratifying experience to start out with this idea that you've drawn on paper and end up with a physical thing that you interact with in your day-to-day life.