What’s your role at Ursa Health and what do you do?
I’m an Analytics Engineer at Ursa Health. My work generally falls into two main areas: client-facing analytics and internal product development. On the client side, I partner directly with customers to deliver analytics that support the initiatives they’re actively working on. This can include creating fully custom dashboards, measures, and purpose-built data tables, as well as deploying Ursa’s standard analytics modules and tailoring them to fit each client’s specific needs and workflows.
A big part of that work is making sure insights are not only accurate, but also usable. I work closely with client teams to ensure the information we deliver is presented in a way that’s intuitive, actionable, and aligned with how they make decisions. My goal is always to help clients clearly understand what’s happening in their data so they can feel confident acting on it.
On the product side, I help build scalable, reusable analytics that can be packaged and delivered across clients. This includes developing standardized modules and analytic deliverables such as quality measures. Across both areas, my main focus is on helping clients get the maximum value out of their data by turning complex information into insights they can trust and use every day.
Can you share a little about your background?
In college, I started off by studying mathematics with the goal of becoming a professor. Toward the end of my junior year, one of my professors kept telling the class that big data was the future and encouraged us to check out some of the work the statistics and data science professors were doing. That led me to take a summer course in business analytics (a new term back then) so that I could have a foundation for exploring more of these courses during my senior year. While I felt comfortable with my technical ability by that point, the applied statistics and business analytics courses I took helped me understand the importance of effectively communicating complex analyses and problems to stakeholders- that even the coolest analysis in the world will fall flat if the end user can’t understand it.
After graduating, I joined a healthcare analytics startup focused on helping employer benefits leaders manage their health plans. It was a crash course in healthcare data. I quickly saw just how complex the ecosystem is, how many vendors can be involved in a single patient’s care, and how incomplete or inaccurate data can lead to poor decisions and bad outcomes. I fell in love with the challenge of wrangling messy data, untangling complicated processes, and ultimately seeing my work implemented in ways that made a measurable difference.
Even with all its complexity and red tape, I can’t imagine working in another industry. Healthcare data can be frustrating to work with, and the system itself is far from perfect, but the problems are endlessly interesting.
Why did you decide to work for Ursa Health?
I was looking for a smaller company that was working on big problems. When I came across Ursa Health, I was drawn to the approach described on their website and was curious to meet the folks behind it. Once I met the team, I was all in. The people I met were kind, experienced, and seemed genuinely interested in the work. I knew immediately that I could learn a ton from them and hopefully contribute a bit as well!
What do you find to be the best part about working with Ursa Health?
Number one, the technology and data model. I was all too familiar with the headaches of trying to incorporate novel data into a model to make it usable downstream. I’m consistently impressed by how quickly the team can incorporate new data, often buried deep within an EHR, into the existing Ursa Core Data Model in a clean, scalable way. Seeing that data become usable immediately for analytics work with clients is something that still amazes me. To be honest, I was nervous about working on a “no-code” platform as the ones I have used in the past have been overly simplistic, but Ursa’s approach is very powerful. It’s just as effective, if not more so, than a team of SQL devs cranking out custom code and it’s structured in a way that makes complex logic easy to understand for people looking at an analysis for the first time. Complex timelines rock!
Number two, the people! Not only is everybody experienced, smart, and churning out cool work, but they're also kind and super generous with their time. As a new member of the team working on something as specific as Ursa Studio, I was nervous about getting up to speed on the platform and data model. However, every time I have asked for help, people have been quick to jump in, often going beyond my immediate questions to explain concepts they know I'll encounter later. The depth of experience on the team is also awesome. Given everyone’s diverse backgrounds, you are bound to find someone with knowledge on practically any topic who is willing to share what they know.
That combination of technical setup, experience, and supportive collaboration makes Ursa a great place to work.
What is one thing people are surprised to learn about you?
I originally wanted to be an astronomer when I entered college. I had big dreams of staring through telescopes and communicating my findings to the masses! The thought of making a career out of exploring the unknown was very exciting to my 18-year-old self.
But reality struck. The fear of finding a job, making a living, and the possibility of having to live in very remote places all pushed me in a different direction (plus one physics course that I really, really did not want to finish). Some things are better off a hobby and I can’t wait to share that hobby with my son one day!
