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, making her way up 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, who had always enjoyed work, had a new infusion of purpose after becoming a mother; it encouraged her to take that leap into a new workplace and 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.
‘We all saw the challenges in wrangling massive amounts of data.’
SHANNON SHALLCROSS, BetaXAnalytics LLC CEO
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. They set out to create a company that used 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,” said Shallcross of Regine and Murphy, who approached her with the idea for the company. “I saw it in my role at Amica, too.”
As it worked out, 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 tons of data out there. Advanced technology that can aggregate it all effectively is a definite need. Shallcross said 30 percent of all data stored is in health care alone. Of the 6,000 data scientists in the U.S., only 180 work in health care, she said.
“It’s an industry where they are needed most but where the least exist,” she said.
Cloaked in complexity, health care is an area in which costs are too high and outcomes leave much to be desired. 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, who then have information to act if needed.
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. If it can’t see them, it won’t be able to close gaps in care, nor rectify wasted health care dollars.
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.
The BetaXAnalytics website tells of a solution and success for this client, for example: “We built an interface to identify physician opportunities to move their patients from nonpreferred to preferred brand drugs, leading to savings of [more than] $2 million for a small health plan.”
Physicians can just get accustomed to prescribing certain drugs to patients, Shallcross said – until they have reason to make a change.
“It’s just a matter of having information and seeing from health care and financial [standpoints], ‘this is what this means,’ ” she said. “I think it’s just habit.”
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 where they should be educating. BetaXAnalytics tracks it all and reports back, usually on a quarterly basis.
In her time out of work, Shallcross makes time for another important passion – the arts.
Having taken piano and voice lessons throughout high school and college, she was also a ballet dancer. A Pennsylvania native, her parents and siblings all played musical instruments as she was growing up.
“Holidays would be like a Christmas-carol jamboree,” she said.
Having so many different musical organizations in a small state such as Rhode Island is a huge plus, said Shallcross, a firm believer that music develops a unique part of one’s brain. She’s been a committee chair for Festival Ballet Providence and a board member of the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra and Music School.
Just as she sees data science as crucial to the future of health care, Shallcross sees music education as key for the future of children and has created Bravo! Professionals, a group of executives that works to raise funds for music education in Rhode Island elementary schools.
