Health Equity
Creating a more equitable system for the health of America.
Organization: Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
Role: Chief Architect
Team size: 50
Project overview: Equip all health care systems across the Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations with more granular, standardized racial, ethnic, language, sexual orientation and gender identity data.
Mission Statement
Everyone should have access to affordable, high-quality health care regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or age.
“Your health shouldn’t depend on the color of your skin, where you live or how much money you make. But for too many Americans, those factors stand in the way of achieving good health and well-being.”
Solution
Formulate a National Health Equity Strategy and commit to changing the trajectory of health disparities and building a more equitable health care system – for everyone.
As part of that strategy: standardize health equity data.
“Data is foundational to understanding disparities in health and to measuring our progress in eliminating them.”
Technical Details
Equip all health care systems across the Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations with more granular, standardized racial, ethnic, language, sexual orientation and gender identity data.
My role was primarily as Chief Architect responsible for the overall system design and delivery. Responsible for full project life-cycle from project inception (business case, examining existing systems, desired outcome), architecture, proof-of-concept, through implementation, and delivery.
Manage and led teams consisting of customer domain experts and technologists to ensure successful delivery and maintainability. Accomplishments include:
• Technical proof-of-concepts to de-risk technical unknowns and iterate on requirements
• ETL framework for processing thousands of vendor data feeds for millions of patients
• Scaling compute resources via data partitioning or pipelining based
• Defining SLAs on performance, data access, and reliability
• Meeting SLAs via distributed computation, data caching, and queues
• Replacing legacy systems that required extensive manual operation and maintenance
• Using the Ab Initio software stack for large scale processing (big data, SQL, analytics)
• Generative AI for business rule to code transformation
• Business self-service capabilities where non-developers can make software changes
• Ensuring that systems guard patient privacy and security
Result
After combining health equity data from a number of sources: patient, providers, algorithms, BCBS companies have been able to leverage this data to the benefit of patients, an example below:
Independence Blue Cross used member-provided and imputed data to uncover disparities in maternal health outcomes among members in particular ZIP codes in Philadelphia. To curb adverse outcomes, the health plan focused on interventions to reduce risk, including helping members mitigate hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. They partnered with Cayaba Care, an organization that deploys maternity navigators who resemble their patients and can relate to their lived experiences. The navigators work with at-risk women as often as desired, throughout and beyond their pregnancies. Ongoing improvements in data collection and analysis are helping the health plan measure the impact of this intervention.