Business Women Awards 2019 | HONOREE
Shannon Shallcross, BetaXAnalytics LLC
WHEN Shannon Shallcross began working for Amica Mutual Insurance Co. in Lincoln in 2002, she had no intentions of leaving the company, or the industry.
Hired as an undergraduate, she traveled extensively for Amica and happily moved up the ladder.
“I was so impressed. Everyone who I met was passionate about their mission to serve customers,” she said.
Shallcross stayed with Amica for more than a decade, advancing to assistant vice president of sales and client services before accepting a position as national vice president of client management with Provant Health in East Greenwich, where she stayed for two years.
Taking the job with Provant, she said, was a decision made after a realigning of priorities after her first child, Teddy, now 5, was born. Shallcross had a new infusion of purpose after becoming a mother; it encouraged her to take that leap into a new industry.
“It became more about leaving a legacy for kids, about recognizing and using your strengths,” she said. Teddy now has a brother, 3-year-old Gethan.
Provant is where Shallcross met the rest of the force behind BetaXAnalytics LLC in East Greenwich: Mark Regine, chief epidemiologist, and Phillip Murphy, technologist. The three had their own areas of expertise but had collaborated at Provant. Regine and Murphy approached her with the idea for the company, and they set out to use technology to make health care more transparent to employers, identifying potential cost savings and better wellness initiatives for employees.
“We all saw the challenges in wrangling massive amounts of data,” Shallcross said. “I saw it in my role at Amica, too.”
Shallcross’ extensive knowledge of health and insurance industries would serve her and BetaXAnalytics clients well. She took the role of CEO.
In the health care industry, it is especially cumbersome to make sense of the endless data out there. Advanced technology that can aggregate the data effectively is a definite need. Shallcross said 30% of all data stored is related to health care. But, of the 6,000 data scientists in the U.S., only 180 work in health care, she said.
Shallcross said the health industry’s evolution to a more performance-based business model gives providers incentive to be part of the solution. But for employers? They can’t fix what they can’t see.
BetaXAnalytics does its part by cleaning and aggregating data, making health care and its costs transparent to employers.
Without all vendor data in one place, for example, a company would have a difficult time strategizing things such as wellness plans, proposing pharmacy-spend changes or structuring benefits packages.
These data complexities vary, so BetaXAnalytics customizes its solutions.
“You may have one patient recorded in 20 different places,” said Shallcross, or a procedure coded incorrectly, or patients on conflicting medications, or medications where a lower-priced version exists.
Many companies are beginning to realize that we need data scientists, Shallcross said. They help employers see what their spending looks like – their worker population, what medications might be driving costs, where they should be investing and educating. BetaXAnalytics tracks it all and reports back, usually on a quarterly basis.
