Senior Director, Health Economics & Actuarial Analytics

Job description

### **About Foodsmart:** Foodsmart is the leading Foodcare platform in the U.S., built to deliver nutrition-driven healthcare at scale. Powered by a national network of Registered Dietitians, Foodsmart combines personalized clinical nutrition care, behavior change tools, and food benefits to improve member health outcomes while lowering healthcare costs. Our platform is designed to foster healthier food choices, drive lasting behavior change, and deliver sustainable health outcomes. Through our highly personalized, digital platform, we guide more than 3 million members—including those in employer-sponsored health plans, regional and national Medicaid managed care organizations, Medicare Advantage plans, and commercial insurers—on a tailored journey to eating well while saving time and money. Foodsmart seamlessly integrates dietary assessments and nutrition counseling with online food ordering and cost-effective meal planning for the entire family, optimizing ingredients both at home and on the go. We partner with national and regional retailers across the U.S., many of whom accept SNAP/EBT, making healthier food more accessible. Additionally, we assist members with SNAP enrollment and management, providing tangible access to nutritious food. In 2024, Foodsmart secured a $200 million investment from TPG’s Rise Fund, which supports entrepreneurs dedicated to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This investment helps us expand our reach, particularly to low-income workers who are disproportionately affected by diet-related diseases. At Foodsmart, our mission is to make nutritious food accessible and affordable for everyone, regardless of economic status. We are committed to a set of core values that shape our culture and work environment: 👥 Customer First - You start with the member and work backwards. 🚀 Make It Happen - You act with urgency, use data, and hold high standards. 🤝 One Team - You collaborate with respect and commit as a group. Whether you're a dietitian, a commercial leader, or a technologist, working at Foodsmart means being part of a team that is passionate, supportive, and driven by a shared purpose. Join us in transforming the way people access and enjoy healthy food. ### **About the Role:** Foodsmart’s value proposition rests on a claim: we improve outcomes for the members who need it most, and we save payers real money doing it. We’re looking for a Senior Director of Health Economics & Actuarial Analytics who can make that claim airtight, rigorous enough to hold up when a payer’s own actuarial team pressure tests it. This role owns the full chain from clinical improvement to economic value. It starts with measuring what actually changed for a client’s members: weight loss, A1c improvement, blood pressure control, HEDIS performance. It ends with quantifying what that improvement is worth and defending that number in front of the people writing the check. You’ll also help shape our value-based care strategy, including which populations we should be targeting and what performance we can credibly commit to. Health economists and actuaries approach these problems differently, and either can be excellent here. What matters is the standard you hold yourself to. Our numbers get validated by payers’ own actuarial teams, which means the work has to be built the way they would build it, with their assumptions about trend, credibility, and risk adjustment. This is our most senior data science leadership role, reporting directly to the VP of Analytics & Data Science. You’ll lead a small team while staying deeply hands-on with the methodology yourself, and you’ll be expected to use AI as a genuine force multiplier, to move faster, go deeper, and extend your reach well beyond what the headcount alone would suggest. You’ll also be a partner on our peer-reviewed research work, which we pursue with academic collaborators and our founder and Chief Science Officer. The strongest candidates will have done this inside a telehealth or digital health company, or will have built their foundation on the payer or consulting side and then moved into digital health. What matters most is that you have proven value to payers before, repeatedly, and know what it takes for those numbers to be believed. ### You will: - Own how we measure clinical outcomes across client member populations: weight loss, A1c, blood pressure, food insecurity, HEDIS measures, and the quality metrics our clients hold us to. - Own Foodsmart’s ROI methodology: translating those clinical outcomes into economic value, and identifying which member populations we help the most. - Represent that methodology directly to payers and external actuarial and consulting firms, defending our approach under real technical scrutiny rather than just presenting a final number. - Own the analytical substance of the value story we tell individual clients, grounded in their own members’ outcomes rather than generic benchmarks. - Help shape our value-based care strategy, including which member populations to target and what performance we can credibly stand behind. - Build our outcomes and ROI methodology as a scalable system, one that extends to new populations and new client conversations without being rebuilt from scratch each time. - Partner on peer-reviewed research with academic collaborators - Work with our clinical team to translate findings and best practices into how care is actually delivered. - Lead and develop a small team while staying hands-on, and lean on AI and other tooling to extend how much ground you and your team can cover. ### You are: - Rigorous in the way a payer’s actuarial team is rigorous. You reason about cost, utilization, risk, and credibility with real discipline, and you know where a methodology is most likely to be attacked. - Fluent in both clinical quality measurement and economic value, and comfortable moving between the two. You can look at a change in A1c across a population and know how to turn it into a number a payer will accept. - Comfortable being the technical counterpart to a payer’s own actuaries and consultants: unintimidated by scrutiny, and able to defend methodology choices in real time. - Seasoned. You have proven value to payers repeatedly, and you are not learning ROI methodology on the job. - A systems builder who thinks in terms of scale: a repeatable methodology, not a one-off analysis redone for every new client or payer. - Able to translate technical findings into how care actually gets delivered, working alongside clinical and care delivery teams. - Someone who treats AI as a genuine lever on your own impact. You actively look for ways to use it to work faster and go deeper, and you have a point of view on where it helps and where rigor still demands a human. - Comfortable leading a small team while staying personally hands-on with the hardest analytical work yourself. ### You have: - A background in health economics, actuarial science, or a closely related quantitative field, with a track record of applying it to healthcare cost and value questions. An advanced degree or actuarial credentials (ASA, FSA, MAAA) are a plus but not required if you have equivalent hands-on depth. - Experience proving ROI and value inside a telehealth or digital health company, or a foundation on the payer or consulting side followed by time in digital health. - Hands-on experience measuring clinical outcomes and quality across populations, including familiarity with HEDIS and common chronic condition measures. - Deep, hands-on experience with healthcare claims data, both medical and pharmacy (Rx), including the practical realities of using it for cost and utilization analysis. - Deep expertise in causal inference as applied to healthcare cost and outcomes: matched cohort design, risk adjustment, and quasi-experimental methods. - Direct experience presenting and defending ROI methodology with payers, actuaries, or similarly technical external audiences. - Experience with value-based care arrangements and a point of view on what a provider or vendor can credibly commit to. - Peer-reviewed publication experience is a plus. - Experience partnering with clinical or care delivery teams to translate findings into practice. - Comfort working directly with data (SQL, R, or Python) to conduct your own analysis. - Familiarity with AI-native tooling (Claude Code, or equivalent) as a way to accelerate analysis. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write for external, technical, and non-technical audiences alike.