Choosing Healthcare: Data and Career at Strata

Strata’s employees welcome the Business Today students to their Chicago office.

The first thing I noticed about Strata was the sleek, cool design of its office. There was a quality of sharp freshness in its ambience; inspiring slogans were written on the walls and a plethora of bananas and oranges lay available for hungry employees. It came with no surprise then, with the healthy food and mindful culture, that Strata’s mission is to “help heal healthcare.”

Our visit to Strata’s Chicago office started with an inspiring keynote by CEO Dan Michelson. For Strata, he emphasized, it’s not just data that runs through their computers—they’re human lives. With the cost of healthcare for a standard family of four jumping from $3,000 to $20,000 in the span of a few years, healthcare has become one of the biggest socioeconomic problems of our time. The human lifespan has extended, and there have been more instances in obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Yet despite all these problems, the healthcare market hasn’t modernized much at all. That’s really what makes Strata so compelling to Mr. Michelson. He stressed that it’s important to “get excited about a market first rather than a company.” For him, a great market is far more interesting than a crowded sector.

For enormous problems like healthcare, it’s easy to become frustrated by particularities and shy away from diving into specifics. Nevertheless, to perform well and understand the problem, you can’t avoid the task of “getting into the weeds.”

While the entire healthcare market acts like a huge 22 x 22 Rubik’s Cube that has a central problem with many moving pieces, Strata is targeting one specific area: data management for healthcare providers. Through StrataJazz®, providers can use the financial tool to forecast their expenses in a fast and accurate manner, analyze cost margins, eliminate unnecessary variation and waste, and make mainstream electronic recordkeeping. This is exceptionally important given the huge customer base of healthcare; Strata is essentially targeting a $400 billion market with a great amount of data at their hands.

CEO Dan Michelson shares with the students why Strata decided to get involved in the healthcare data market.

Why so specific? As Michelson explains, “the world exists in niches and is compiled of companies that specialize in those.” For enormous problems like healthcare, it’s easy to become frustrated by particularities and shy away from diving into specifics. Nevertheless, to perform well and understand the problem, you can’t avoid the task of “getting into the weeds.” Strata values that sense of persistence to continue going deeper and learning about the challenge in order to devise a solution.

This conversation of specificity brings us to Strata’s data science team. Several members of the team joined Business Today students on a conversation surrounding the importance of data science on healthcare. The team at Strata helps unpack complexities in the healthcare system, so hospitals can improve and shift their policies. For instance, they’re working on a tool allowing hospitals to manage cost benchmarking, which helps estimate costs; they’re also building a feature for department normalization in which data from healthcare systems are slotted into normalized categories for direct comparison. Nonetheless, the sheer size of data in healthcare, as well as its disorganization, makes it difficult to actually clean and represent. For instance, even the simple task of associating a doctor to a patient or hospital becomes frustrating when there are 900 different ways to refer to a doctor.

Students broke up into small groups to discuss the growth of data and technology with Strata employees.

As the panel split up to speak with individual tables of students in a small group discussion, it became apparent that data literacy is a necessary 21st century skill. With the growth of technology, data has grown in size and become increasingly available. Being able to understand data can have great significance across any sector. For healthcare in particular, decoding data can help with improving the quality and cost of healthcare for millions of patients facing higher price tags each year.

Our visit at Strata certainly left me with a new sense of purpose and inspiration. Listening to the data science team and their exciting projects invigorated my curiosity. Indeed, it’s exceptionally important to find a workplace in which you can “surround yourself with people who are curious and care about what they do.” Further, Michelson’s greatest advice from the panel was to “find something you care about and work with people you care about.” As a student, it’s easy to concern oneself with salary or perks, but at the end of the day, the satisfaction we take from our everyday work will be most greatly shaped by the overarching impact of our career on the rest of society.