Healthcare Data Scientist at SCAN Health Plan in Long Beach, CA

Founded in 1977 as the Senior Care Action Network, SCAN began with a simple but radical idea: that older adults deserve to stay healthy and independent. That belief was championed by a group of community activists we still honor today as the “12 Angry Seniors.” Their mission continues to guide everything we do.

Today, SCAN is a nonprofit health organization serving more than 500,000 people across Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington, with over $8 billion in annual revenue. With nearly five decades of experience, we have built a distinctive, values-driven platform dedicated to improving care for older adults.

Our work spans Medicare Advantage, fully integrated care models, primary care, care for the most medically and socially complex populations, and next-generation care delivery models. Across all of this, we are united by a shared commitment: combining compassion with discipline, innovation with stewardship, and growth with integrity.

At SCAN, we believe scale should strengthen—not dilute—our mission. We are building the future of care for older adults, grounded in purpose, accountability, and respect for the people and communities we serve.

The Job

This Data Scientist role will be a key member of SCAN's Applied Intelligence team, responsible for developing and applying appropriate advanced analytics techniques to support use cases across the health plan. Use cases will primarily but not exclusively span clinically-oriented priorities. Examples could potentially include improving member clinical outcomes, analysis of the economic and clinical impact of various benefits, building longitudinal predictive models, calculating lifetime value, and leveraging GenAI to identify insights from structured and unstructured data.  

This role will collaborate with business and technical leaders to use advanced analytics in support of SCAN's mission of keeping seniors healthy and independent.

You Will

1. Drive development and implementation of scalable advanced analytics (such as analytical, generative, and agentic AI) to derive insights from previously untapped data. Illustrative examples could include: 

• Building predictive models to improve member clinical and experience outcomes 
• Developing segmentation models based on utilization patterns, social determinants of health, and other risk factors to prioritize interventions and help drive personalization efforts 
• Application of large language models (LLMs) to discrete data (e.g., foundation models, LLMs to synthesize vast quantitative/discrete data). 
• Adaptive clinical program design, optimization, and analysis. 
• Causal inference from observational data (e.g., doubly-robust estimation) 
• Time series methods, including structure and forecasting 
• Compute optimization for massively scaled machine learning or statistical tasks 
• Geospatial analytics to support network optimization or growth strategy 

2. Leverage strong business acumen to identify and prioritize advanced analytics use cases based on SCAN’s highest-value opportunities 

3. Create requirements, test and train models, communicate findings with the business, and support model maintenance.  

4. Help shape and implement SCAN’s data science and AI strategy in coordination with key stakeholders across the company. Manage multiple projects at a time based on the priorities and delivery methodologies of the Applied Intelligence team, while also being a mentor to other analytics practitioners.  

Your Qualifications

• Bachelors Degree or equivalent experience in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or related field required
• Graduate or Advanced Degree or equivalent experience in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or related field preferred
• 3+ years working experience, preferably including healthcare industry experience 
• 3+ years experience using quantitative methods: Statistical modeling, machine learning, large language models, agentic AI, feature engineering 
• 1+ years of experience writing SQL code in relational database environment 
• 2+ years of experience writing code in Python and/or R 
• Experience with Snowflake and/or Databricks as well as Power BI. 
• Experience with Streamlit or other data as a service apps, preferred 
• Advanced knowledge of text analytics techniques leveraging LLMs, preferred 
• Experience in a Medicare Advantage or other managed care environment, preferred. 
• Clinical code knowledge related to claims/utilization, preferred.
• Expertise in Snowflake and Databricks for ML/AI workloads, including optimization and governance.  
• Hands-on experience with LLM development (RAG, embeddings/vector databases, document summarization, chatbot/agent integration using LangChain / LangGraph or similar tools). 
• Familiarity with BI tools (Power BI, Tableau, Streamlit) and integrating ML outputs for business-facing solutions. 
• Strong interpersonal skills, including excellent written and verbal communication skills. 
• Familarity with MLOps practices, including MLflow, Azure DevOps, monitoring, and alerting. 
• Ability to appropriately maintain confidentiality. 
• Familiarity with Agile delivery methodologies (e.g. Scrum, SAFe)

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with ability to explain AI/ML concepts to business and technical audiences. 

• Connects technical work to strategic health plan objectives, such as Stars improvement, member engagement, and cost management 

• Learns emerging AI/ML tools and healthcare regulations quickly and applies them responsibly in production environments 

• Knowledge of real world data (RWD), claims, EMR, and similar healthcare data 

What's in it for you?

• Base Salary Range: $106,200 to $153,705 annually

• An annual employee bonus program

• Robust Wellness Program

• Generous paid-time-off (PTO)

• 11 paid holidays per year, 1 floating holiday, birthday off, and 2 volunteer days

• Excellent 401(k) Retirement Saving Plan with employer match

• Robust employee recognition program

• Tuition reimbursement

• An opportunity to become part of a team that makes a difference to our members and our community every day!

We're always looking for talented people to join our team!  Qualified applicants are encouraged to apply now!

At SCAN we believe that it is our business to improve the state of our world. Each of us has a responsibility to drive Equality in our communities and workplaces. We are committed to creating a workforce that reflects our community through inclusive programs and initiatives such as equal pay, employee resource groups, inclusive benefits, and more.

SCAN is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action workplace. Individuals seeking employment will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status or any other status protected by law. A background check is required.

#LI-JB1 #LI-Hybrid

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities

The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information. 41 CFR 60-1.35(c)