Populytics, Inc., leading regional population health management and health care data analytics firm, and wholly owned subsidiary of Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN), has advanced two members of its informatics team to management positions. Populytics’ work includes the use of data from EMR and insurance claims to generate highly actionable information for risk stratification, quality improvement, and better health care value. The company’s informatics team collects and organizes the data using proprietary infrastructure developed in concert with Optum®, a national information and technology-enabled health services business.
Jason Ebersole has been promoted to Manager, Software Development
As he transitions into a management role within the informatics department, Ebersole will continue to drive the strategic direction of Populytics software development. For the past four years, as Lead Full Stack Web Developer, Ebersole has led a team using Agile development principles to build and maintain web applications such as those for the ProviderWeb Database, Valley Preferred’s Secure Provider Portal, and the Achieving Clinical Excellence® (ACE) incentive program. Ebersole’s commitment to test-driven development has resulted in a proliferation of hundreds of unit tests in all of Populytics’ production applications and has produced great improvements in their accuracy and reliability.
Ebersole first came to work for LVHN after graduating from DeSales University. His work began with projects focused on Valley Preferred, the physician hospital organization affiliated with LVHN. He helped migrate Valley Preferred from spreadsheets and Access databases to Microsoft SQL databases, .NET applications, and SSRS reports to support its clinical initiatives, including the Disease Management and Physician Self Audit programs.
After the formation of Populytics, Ebersole focused on moving Populytics’ custom applications away from the desktop and into web solutions, as well as implementing a new DevOps strategy. During this time, Ebersole built the Secure Provider Portal, a custom website and tool that physicians, health care providers, and office managers utilize to view the organization’s incentive results and metrics.
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Rich Fotiades has been promoted to Manager, Data Engineering
As he transitions into a management role, Fotiades will continue to lead Populytics’ claims processing capabilities in the rapidly evolving big data space. As Lead Data Management Specialist for the past four years, he led a team of data engineers in the construction and transformation of Populytics’ conventional SQL-based claims data pipeline into a high-performance big data infrastructure. This change has reduced the department’s processing time and increased storage capacity well over tenfold. He has also served as Populytics’ in-house expert on Optum tools and claims data feeds from eight current payers while coordinating the many projects of his team members.
Fotiades developed his expertise with medical and pharmacy claims after graduating from Lehigh University and beginning work with Spectrum Administrators (SAI), forerunner of Populytics. With SAI, Fotiades worked with a diverse mix of health plan, laboratory, pharmaceutical, and Health Risk Assessment (HRA) data, developed claims extracts to support Valley Preferred’s Achieving Clinical Excellence® (ACE) program, and developed modeling and analysis skills on a variety of high-profile assignments.
In 2014, Fotiades transitioned into health care analytics when Populytics was formed. He began work on claims data translation and data pipeline development with a multi-hospital initiative, and he led the technical implementation, validation, and user acceptance of the full suite of Optum analytic processing tools.
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