Jessica Curran was always drawn to healthcare. Initially considering a clinical role, it wasn’t until she found a way to combine her love for math with improving health outcomes that all the pieces fell into place. Today, Jessica is a data scientist with over 20 years of experience who is devoted to advancing healthcare through the practical use of augmented intelligence (AI). Recently, Jessica was recognized for her outstanding work in the field; she was named a 2024 Women Tech Awards Finalist in July.
“I have always enjoyed math, especially using it to solve challenging problems. It turns out there are a lot of really challenging problems in healthcare,” says Jessica, Data Science and Analytics Vice President at Health Catalyst. “Nothing in healthcare is straightforward or has an easy answer. Everything we try to answer or understand has a lot of moving parts, and I love to work with providers and other experts to find ways to use data and analytics to get the answers we need to make healthcare better.”
Scaling AI-enabled insights and improvements across health systems brings deep meaning to her work. In fact, it was Health Catalyst’s ability to scale best practices and improvement efforts that attracted Jessica to the company.
“Health Catalyst brings together all of the different types of work I have done in the past and adds meaning and scalability.” Jessica continued, “At Health Catalyst, I’m able to help solve the types of problems I saw in previous roles in unique ways and with a group of experts dedicated to improving healthcare. In the past, I was often asked to report the news, and that is a far cry from using data and analytics to get to the root of problems and identify opportunities to improve.”
Jessica has worked with dozens of health systems to improve clinical care, access, and cost. Her career has spanned work for an EHR vendor, a popular consumer healthcare website, and teaching biostatistics at the University of Virginia.
These days Jessica says some of her greatest fulfillment comes from the education piece of her work, helping analysts, leaders, and providers achieve that “light-bulb” moment.
“We can use statistics in so many ways and make it accessible to everyone,” Jessica says. “I love getting people over the bridge from avoiding anything to do with statistics to the point where they see things that they weren’t able to see before and recognizing that it can make their work easier.”
Jessica is the product owner for Health Catalyst’s Healthcare.AI™, a suite of AI products and expert services that helps hospitals and health systems dramatically expand the use and use cases for effective AI. This is one of the tools the company uses to scale AI for health system clients.
“The demand for data science services and tools, like Healthcare.AI, is increasing really quickly,” Jessica says. “I’m building a team right now so that we can respond to the demand for this work. We will be focused on deeper analytics, machine learning, program evaluations and other data science work for our clients.”
Jessica will oversee this team, which will continue the work of asking and answering all of the challenging questions that healthcare has to offer, questions such as, “Where should we be suggesting leaders and providers focus their improvement efforts?” and “Are the programs and initiatives already in place having the meaningful impact that we’d hoped?”Jessica says it may seem small in the whole scheme of things, but one of the greatest impacts of AI in healthcare, which has the potential to scale and greatly impact health outcomes, is insight generation.
“Automated insight generation is 100 percent scalable and has the potential to have an impact on every aspect of healthcare—clinical, operational, and financial,” says Jessica. “Everyone in healthcare struggles with wrangling the amount and types of data currently available. How can you take all of this information and figure out what the next right thing to do is? There are pieces of this work that we can automate using AI, but that is only half of the puzzle. A machine can only do so much, but if you bring in the human side and add in what a machine can do, you can make the greatest impact.”
