‘Transparency Is Everything’.

“Transparency is everything,” says Jocelyn Reaves (’17). “We need it to see how we can improve as healthcare practitioners, or in order to see what needs exist within the healthcare space.”

For her practicum, Reaves worked on a web-based application that compares costs and outcomes for different medical procedures across hospitals. The app was created for a medical device client of the market and user experience research organization GfK, where Reaves began interning in the summer of 2016 and has now been hired full-time.

For the app, Reaves compiled publicly accessible data from Medicare on breast, thyroid, gynecologic, cardiac, orthopedic, and spinal procedures at hospitals across the country. Metrics included complication and readmission rates, patient satisfaction scores, annual procedural volume, and reimbursement rates for specific procedures.

While the tool was created for the client to show hospitals the merits of its own products, Reaves says it has obvious applications for improving health care more broadly. It could be used to improve mandated reporting in health care, she says, and to help implement value-based care for providers nationwide.

Building this tool, Reaves says, also showed where things are not so transparent. “We have this publicly available data and we can do a lot with it,” she says, “but you can see that gaps exist. Some of those gaps are geography-based, and others may be linked to faulty data collection, among other reasons. Using tools like this allows you to see where you can improve.”

Reaves, who also interned at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Boston Public Schools during her time at SPH, says data analysis is the place to be when it comes to working to improve health on a large scale.

“Public health falls apart if you don’t have data,” she says. “Being able to do data analysis, with skills learned at BU and here at Gfk, is really important and valuable.”

—Michelle Samuels