IT Director – Data Management @ LynxCare

1. Purpose of the position

Leading and growing a Data Management team that is accountable for processing clinical structured and unstructured data, loading it into a healthcare standard (OMOP) database, within the required data quality standards, leveraging the NLP data platform and structured data ETL pipeline.

2. Reporting

The Director Data Management reports to the COO. 

3. Ongoing projects and challenges

The operations are at the centerpiece of LynxCare’s ambition. The Director will realize that ambition, by scaling up Lynxcare’s practices, going from 10+ to 100+ hospitals served with the data platform, while keeping up the quality standards for millions of patients’ data and reducing the delivery unit cost by 60%. 

The team works in 3-weeks cycles/sprints and has daily stand-ups for the whole operation team. LynxCare is looking at scaling up this existing set-up. The mindset of the team is open, collaborative and improvement oriented.  

4. Tasks and responsibilities

• Provide coaching and management to a team of data analysts as a direct line manager.
• Set-up best practices, leveraging the experience of the team members and leading them, from serving 10+ hospitals with semi-automated processes today, to serving 100+ hospitals with almost full automation. 
• Drive initiatives for process improvements. Deal with process inefficiencies, data unexpected issues (input and output). Creating more scalable processes, building a bigger team, new tools, more robust processes in data quality management and master data management. 
• Steer the integration of technology to enhance the team productivity, along the following areas: data quality management, master data management, ETL, model training, annotation, medical ontologies.
• Ensure the team is delivering successfully with high customer satisfaction levels.
• Assist in stakeholder management with clients (hospitals/life sciences).
• Develop an optimal team culture focusing on the goals of the organization while developing the individuals.
• Data management is the core expertise of LynxCare and will remain mostly internal. However, the Data Management Director will look at partners for some components where additional capacity or tech would contribute to LynxCare’s ambitions (buy or build).
• The Data Management Director collaborates closely with the other operations teams and other departments, especially the CTO and Product Manager, to ensure the platform roadmap is aligned with the operations team needs. The collaboration and knowledge sharing between teams are key elements in scaling up LynxCare’s practices. 
• Assist in recruitment (in collaboration with COO) to support LynxCare’s steep HR ambitions

5. Reason for the job opening

The Director Data Management is a completely new position to support the growth of the organization.

6. Expectations first 12 months

• Oversee the delivery of 50+ databases to our client
• Reinforce master data management and performance management procedures
• Optimize processes to reduce mandays and improve quality
• Play an active role in expanding the team to have increased delivery capacity

7. Team structure

The operations team is managed by the COO, together with a team of 3 Directors. The Hospital Alliance Director RWE (Real World Evidence) ensures with his team that the expectations (scope and delivery RWE reports), context, architecture and systems of each customer, are correctly integrated into the LynxCare platform, with a guarantee for correct data connections / access, excellent project management and delivery . The Director of Data Management and his team are responsible for processing the structured and unstructured clinical data, loading it into a healthcare standard (OMOP) database, within the required data quality standards, leveraging the NLP data platform and structured data ETL pipeline. The RWE Analytics Director's team provides data analytics and output, based on real world evidence, to help hospitals make faster, better, data-based decisions.

Data Management Director: Team, data landscape, projects and tasks and responsibilities

7.1 The current team

The (newly formed) Data Management team is around 7 FTE as a starting point. It will grow along the company’s ambition.  The team is quite homogenous. Most team members finished their life science Phds before joining LynxCare and are around or just below 30. They are all collaborative and open to feedback. LynxCare also has open positions within the team, which will be focused on tech-first profiles (i.e. data scientists, data engineers, etc.)

The team's core mission is twofold:

• Processing structured and unstructured clinical data, loading it into a healthcare standard (OMOP) database, within the required data quality standards, leveraging the NLP data platform and structured data ETL pipeline.
   
• Managing the continuity and traceability of the data platform, by applying best practices in data quality management, master data management, governance and database performance.

8. Data landscape and complexity

All work done within the data platform is developed in Azure. The technology landscape includes databricks, python, dbt (SQL), GIT, … The technical landscape in data quality management, master data management and governance, will need to be reinforced, driven by the Data Management Director in coordination with the R&D team.

The data processing processes are complex as they relate to mapping structured data (coming from various sources) and processing unstructured data through an NLP engine. That requires a few iterations to reach the necessary level of quality.  Besides that, the practices around data quality management, master data management, governance and performance management are insufficiently mature.

All processes have owners and are documented on Confluence. Given the speed of innovation, LynxCare is currently looking at improving its knowledge sharing practices.

9. Ongoing projects and challenges

The operations are at the centerpiece of LynxCare’s ambition. The Director will realize that ambition, by scaling up Lynxcare’s practices, going from 10+ to 100+ hospitals served with the data platform, while keeping up the quality standards for millions of patients’ data and reducing the delivery unit cost by 60%. 

The team works in 3-weeks cycles/sprints and has daily stand-ups for the whole operation team. LynxCare is looking at scaling up this existing set-up. The mindset of the team is open, collaborative and improvement oriented.