Programmer-Analyst

Thousands of mergers and acquisitions involving health systems, hospitals, physician practices, post-acute care facilities and other health care providers have fundamentally reshaped health care markets.  Prior research finds consolidation is associated with increases in prices and few, if any, improvements in quality. A new research program, funded by the National Institute on Aging, is building on this foundation to comprehensively investigate the effects of health care market consolidation (including facility openings and closings) and health systems on care and outcomes of patients experiencing acute stroke and cardiac events. With a focus on high-risk patients and with access to longitudinal micro-data on patients, health care organizations and markets, an expert multi-disciplinary research team will use quasi-experimental methods to investigate mechanisms by which changes in health care delivery systems impact this critical population and develop targets for policy intervention.

For this research, Professor David Cutler of Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is seeking to hire a programmer-analyst. This person will join a team of team of people refining and extending the Health Systems and Provider Database, creating patient cohorts, measuring and analyzing changes in healthcare markets, and conducting regression analyses. The work requires a sophisticated understanding of data, a high level of programming skill, and knowledge and experience conducting statistical analyses.  

Essential Duties and Responsibilities (other duties may be assigned as required)

• Scraping, cleaning, transforming, and combining the project’s large datasets from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, non-governmental proprietary sources, and the public domain to facilitate research analysis
• Building and refining algorithms
• Maintaining code repository and documentation of harmonized data and cohort extraction programs 
• Develop strategies to implement a research agenda (cleaning and summarizing data, estimating models) 
• Implement different statistical methodologies 
• Ensure the research being produced is reproducible
• Create interactive visualization to demonstrate different aspects of results 

Minimum Required Technical Skills and Qualifications

• Strong analytical background 
• An orientation to detail
• Knowledge of statistical software (STATA, SAS, or R; Python, is a plus) 
• The ability to communicate clearly and write documentation is key
• Bachelor’s degree in data science, statistics, economics, or related quantitative field

• Ability to work with and develop research files from large datasets
• Ability to work independently and with researchers in remote locations

Preferred:

• Familiarity with the health care system and clinical terms and concepts
• Experience with medical claims data
• Experience working in a research environment and an ability to anticipate the needs of academic researchers will be considered