Manager, Data Science & Engineering · Baltimore Health Analytics
Production analytics in regulated healthcare: CMS Star Ratings, HEDIS, and value-based care.

I build and govern production analytics systems in regulated healthcare: pipelines, semantic layers, and CMS Star Ratings quality-measure systems that clinical, operational, and executive teams can trust and act on.

I started as a news writer and book editor, moved into healthcare research at UW-Madison, and now lead data engineering. That path still shapes how I work: clear questions, defensible methods, and results that change decisions. Today I'm a player-coach manager, building and running the pipelines while managing the engineers who own them.

• Production data pipelines — EHR data modeling across Epic, Cerner, Veradigm, and athenahealth; ETL/ELT on AWS and Databricks; stored procedures built to survive edge cases in regulated populations
• Analytics governance — semantic layers, metric definitions, and dbt-versioned models that give stakeholders one version of truth
• Value-based care analytics — ACO, MSSP, HEDIS, and CMS Medicare Stars performance tracking; benchmarking and significance testing against CMS methodology
• Platform reliability — observability, incident response, and cost optimization across cloud data infrastructure

• Stars Cliff Simulator — interactive teaching demo of the 4.0★ Quality Bonus Payment cliff in CMS Star Ratings. Pure vanilla JS, no dependencies, synthetic weights.
  Live demo · Methodology · Source
• Medicare Advantage Insight Engine — a self-running daily feed that separates CMS Medicare Advantage rulemaking signal from press-release noise.
  Live feed · Repo · Write-up
• Healthcare Workforce Transition Platform (SkillSprout) — an O*NET-based model estimating reskilling transition probabilities across the healthcare workforce.
  Repo · Write-up
• ECDS Shock Index — a HEDIS Electronic Clinical Data Systems (ECDS) measure prototype and worked example.
  Repo · Write-up
• Stochastic Epidemic Simulator — a SEIRV epidemic model that runs entirely in the browser via Pyodide, with Plotly charts.
  Live demo · Write-up

• Baltimore Health Analytics — Manage two data scientists (a lead and an IC); own measure methodology, pipeline reliability, and release governance for a Medicare Advantage Stars analytics platform. Built a self-service forecast-versus-actual Stars cutpoint dashboard adopted by data science and the CEO.
• Health Catalyst — Led the post-acquisition migration of all analytics to a multi-cloud (AWS + Azure/Databricks) stack. Cut monthly storage cost ~50% and weekly load latency by 24+ hours; standardized SQL into reusable stored procedures (~70% codebase reduction).
• healthfinch — First analytics hire. Built a HIPAA- and HITRUST-compliant platform from scratch unifying app data and four EHR systems; authored Epic Clarity report libraries deployed across 50+ health systems; governed dashboards absorbed 7× user growth and saved 400+ prep hours per quarter.

Long-form essays on healthcare data engineering, Stars methodology, and measurement. A few recent ones:

• The Metric Isn't Wrong. It's Just Not Where Quality Lives.
• Your Cut Point Forecast Has a Lucas Critique Problem
• Credentialing Looks Rigorous. Its Performance Scores Are Mostly Noise.
• Did Medicaid Work Requirements Work? A Meta-Analysis of Arkansas
• One API Call, Three Ways to Split It: a FRED Case Study

Full archive at zaherkarp.com/blog.

Six peer-reviewed papers on accountable care (Medicare Shared Savings), clinic design and team efficiency, and EHR optimization in primary care, from my years at UW-Madison. A couple of highlights:

• Approaches and challenges to optimizing primary care teams' electronic health record usage — Journal of Innovation in Health Informatics (2014)
• Influence of environmental design on team interactions across 3 family medicine clinics — Health Environments Research & Design Journal (2019)

Full list on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

Engineering & data

Cloud & BI

Healthcare

M.P.H., Biostatistics (2015) and B.A., English Literature (2007), University of Wisconsin-Madison. Graduate Certificate in Patient Safety / Human Factors Engineering (2015).

_{Madison, WI · Remote · zaherkarp.com}