Episode: Inside the Lab: Data Science at Quest Analytics

Everyone talks about the importance of clean, accurate provider data, but who’s actually doing the work to make that real? In this episode of The Totally Adequate Podcast, host April Beane brings two members of Quest Analytics’ data science team out of the lab and onto the mic.

Subhash Seelam and Nebojsa Milosavljevic don’t usually show up in marketing materials. They show up in datasets, identifying anomalies, building models, tracing relationships between providers, facilities, physician groups, and health systems that most people assume are already properly connected. (Spoiler: they’re not.)

Topics Covered

• What data scientists do, and why the role at Quest Analytics is unique
• Why the provider data problem is fundamentally a hierarchical one, and what that means for health plans
• How experimentation, failure, and unexpected discoveries lead to better models
• The principle behind the work: when the foundation isn’t solid, everything built on top of it costs more
• What the future of provider data looks like, and why the industry is finally starting to converge on the right answer

This episode is a conversation with the people doing work that most health plan professionals never see. Work that determines whether a member can actually find an in-network doctor, whether a compliance calculation is based on accurate data, and whether everything downstream is built on something solid.

“When the foundation isn’t solid, everything built on top costs more.” — Subhash Seelam