Today's guest is Sanji Fernando, SVP of Artificial Intelligence and Analytics Platforms at Optum. Part of the UnitedHealthGroup, Optum is powering modern health care by connecting and serving the whole health system across 150 countries. They combine cutting-edge technology, the world’s largest health care database and vast expertise to improve health care delivery, quality and efficiency. They are on a mission to help people live healthier lives and to help make the health system work better for everyone.

Sanji is responsible for leading the AI & Platforms team for Optum Enterprise Analytics in Massachusetts. His team develops AI solutions that predict disease progression, classify medical charts to support risk adjustment and models that recommend the next best action in care, as well as developing the E2E platform for analytics and AI development for OEA. Sanji also leads the education and community building for best practice and use of platforms tools for analytics professionals and data scientists.

In the episode, Sanji will discuss:

The great work they do at Optum,

How to get the data fit for purpose,

Understanding the business problem you are looking to solve,

The challenges of working with Healthcare data,

The importance of monitoring the model development process,

and bringing Machine Learning models into production