Mathematica has appointed vice president Myles Maxfield to lead its data analytics portfolio. Solutions to challenging public policy problems involve multiple disciplines, experiences, and perspectives, and Maxfield is well versed in health care, employment and training, nutrition, and education data and analysis. He also has been instrumental in guiding the company's health work in program integrity, Medicaid analytics, and reporting analytics for the health insurance exchanges. Maxfield will lead the expansion of health analytics work, in addition to ensuring that data analytics are integrated companywide in a meaningful way that benefits our clients and leverages our expertise. In addition to Maxfield's role, Mathematica has created a new Data Management and Analytics department (DMA) led by Dan Shapiro. The DMA includes more than 55 data management experts who, over the past 20 years, have helped government agencies such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service, the Food and Nutrition Service, and state agencies maintain and improve the quality of their administrative data and organizational systems to better achieve their missions.
The Issue
As government agencies at all levels deal with the challenge of managing increasingly scarce resources, they are looking for timely, reliable, and accessible evidence to guide their decisions. Management and analysis of administrative data are rising in importance as ways to address these challenges. The increasing availability of administrative data, coupled with an expanded capacity to process and understand complex and unstructured data, are fueling growth and demand. Management and analysis of administrative data can be cost-effective, particularly when they draw on large-scale data sets compiled from administrative records or linked records from multiple sources.
Our Approach
Mathematica has more than 150 experts working in a variety of capacities on data analytics and management projects. This work is a natural progression of our long-standing leadership analyzing and managing large data sets and longitudinal data, linking that data for large and complex federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and augmenting administrative data with primary data collection. Our expertise in systems design and analysis and statistical methods, coupled with our extensive knowledge of policies, programs, and administrative data sets, helps our clients and decision makers make timely, accurate decisions. Our data analytics capabilities help public agencies develop measures to manage performance, assess quality, and use data with confidence for program monitoring and decision making. We do this through a variety of offerings, including data mining, predictive modeling, real-time performance measure development and monitoring, data warehousing, program integrity analysis, data validation, data visualization, and program-related technical assistance and decision support.
"Mathematica has been a pioneer in both present-day data analytics and program performance and the precursors to that work. This new leadership and management structure will ensure that we meet the needs of our clients today while building the capacity and expertise to realize the full potential of administrative data tomorrow," said Paul Decker, Mathematica president and chief executive officer. "These are exciting and unprecedented times for research and data. Mathematica brings more than 40 years of program knowledge, technical skills, and experience to ensure we ask the right questions and apply the right approaches to solving our clients' complex needs."
Select Projects
Program integrity. Building on more than 30 years of work with the Medicare program, Mathematica experts are assessing and redesigning the program for handling providers' (doctors and hospitals) appeals of program integrity judgments.
Health insurance exchanges. Mathematica participates in the design of the new federal data warehouse for managing data on enrollment and participating health plans in the federal health insurance exchanges.
Performance management. When the U.S. Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration needed to modernize an outdated paper process for financial reporting of employee benefits programs, it approached Mathematica to develop a data processing solution that has earned accolades for its timeliness, transparency, ease of use, efficiency, and accuracy.
For more information about Mathematica's work in data analytics and health quality measures, please contact us via email.
About Mathematica: Mathematica Policy Research seeks to improve public well-being by conducting studies and assisting clients with program evaluation and policy research, survey design and data collection, research assessment and interpretation, and program performance/data management. Its clients include foundations, federal and state governments, and private-sector and international organizations. The employee-owned company, with offices in Princeton, NJ; Ann Arbor, MI; Cambridge, MA; Chicago, IL; Oakland, CA; and Washington, DC; has conducted some of the most important studies of health care, nutrition, education, international, disability, family support, employment, and early childhood policies and programs.