Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey is on the trail of all things data, with a new executive position given a charge of making sense of it all, plus some other major comings and goings.
Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey has named veteran computer engineer Jason Cooper to the new position of chief analytics officer.
A West Virginia native who spent a decade working on NASA spaceflight software, Cooper is being charged with leading Horizon's enterprise data analytics and informatics, heading up a newly created analytics team under the strategy division.
"With the wealth of data analytics and leadership experience that Jason brings to the company through this position, Horizon will be better able to strategically respond to the coverage needs of our 3.8 million members and strengthen our market leadership position in New Jersey," said Minal Patel, MD, Horizon's chief strategy officer (another relatively new position, created last year).
Cooper most recently worked as business analytics VP for three years at Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Iowa and South Dakota; previously he was Cigna's analytics VP, from 2009 to 2012, and before that director of healthcare analytics for CVS Caremark, from 2006 to 2009.
What marked Cooper's entrance into life sciences and healthcare was a one-year stint in 2005 as director of the Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research and Innovation Center, a non-profit R&D center located at the former site of the Union Carbide chemical company's research park in West Virginia.
Cooper actually spent his early years working in health informatics, developing computational models of the human lung and neural networks to predict cholesterol management treatment as an intern with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. In between that and his shift to healthcare a decade ago, Cooper worked in lifecycle verification and validation on manned and unmanned NASA spaceflight software for Titan Systems Corporation, now known as L3 Communications.
His appointment as chief analytics officer at Horizon marks something of a boom in data science hiring at health insurers and in healthcare generally--as data from many sources, once held in paper or hard to collate, can now be studied, used for planning, preventive action, comparative effectiveness or even monetization.
Horizon, New Jersey's largest insurer, is also on a roll with some other executive changes. The company recently reorganized its sales leadership, with Joseph Albano moving from consumer and dental markets VP to commercial and major accounts VP, and Michael Considine, the sales director of midsize, public and small group accounts, promoted to vice president of consumer and small group markets.
For Horizon's largest account, the 730,000 member State Health Benefits Program, the company has also made a major promotion. David Perry, a 27-year veteran of the company, is taking on the job of SHBP VP, replacing Carol Banks, who retired in March.