Research Scientist

Independence Blue Cross is seeking a Research Scientist to work in the Advanced Analytics area with a team of researchers and analysts to conduct a wide range of prospective and retrospective studies related to health outcomes and medical costs, marketing and communications, provider networks, medication adherence and pharmacy utilization, benefit configuration, and the like. This position will have responsibilities in the following areas:

Responsibilities:

• Work with business areas (e.g., clinical services, pharmacy, sales, marketing, product development, actuarial, etc.) to understand programs and business needs
• Develop and execute a wide variety of HEOR studies including retrospective program evaluations and prospective studies related to health care utilization and costs to help inform business decisions
• Collaborate with team members, providing statistical and methodological expertise and input on study design for projects
• Present results to business stakeholders in a clear and concise manner
• Collaborate with external research partners on HEOR study designs and methodology
• Where appropriate, contribute to manuscript preparation for peer-reviewed publications and give conference presentations

Qualifications - External

Technical Skills:

• Proficient conducting complex statistical analyses in R
• Experience implementing a wide-range of research designs involving both statistical and causal inference methodologies, including RCTs; retrospective cohort studies; longitudinal study designs; propensity score matching/weighting techniques; regression discontinuity; difference-in-difference modeling; linear, logistic, Poisson regression; Cox proportional hazards models; mixed effects models, etc.
• Experience with administrative medical and pharmacy claims data
• Experience manipulating and analyzing large, high-dimensional datasets from multiple sources
• Familiarity with relational databases and using SQL to merge and pull data
• Familiarity with reproducible workflows such as Rmarkdown/Jupyter notebooks

Business Skills:

• Excellent written and oral presentation skills
• Record of publishing in peer-reviewed journals

Qualifications:

• PhD in statistics, economics, marketing, public health, psychology, epidemiology, or related field
• 5+ years’ experience conducting health services research/HEOR studies
• Familiarity with Python, pySpark, sparklyr, and machine learning approaches (supervised and unsupervised techniques such as random forest, regression, GBM, clustering techniques, regularization and dimensionality reduction, etc) applied in a Hadoop environment a plus.