Employee spotlight: How data analyst Dmitri Repnikov finds purpose in helping improve patient lives
At Cadence, we believe that a better quality of life begins with better care. No matter what role at the company, our team is on a mission to give everyone consistent, proactive healthcare every day. In our Employee Perspectives series, you will hear how different Cadence team members are meeting the company's mission and why they are passionate about their work.
This week, data analyst Dmitri Repnikov discusses his work on the data team. If you’re interested in learning more about Cadence and current job opportunities, check out our careers page to learn more.
1. Tell us a little bit about what you and your team do here at Cadence. What are your core responsibilities?
I’m Dmitri, and I joined Cadence after working in various data roles at Postmates and Hinge Health. Given the prevalence of chronic conditions, and how mismanaged patients with these conditions are, I was drawn to Cadence’s mission to improve patient lives and leave a positive impact on the world.
As for my team, we are small but mighty. No one day is the same, and the problems we solve are always stimulating and highly cross-functional. We make sense of all the data, which can come from both internal and external sources. Internal data helps our team answer questions about those patients who are already enrolled in our programs. Examples could include patient engagement or clinical outcomes. We’re able to measure the efficacy of our programs and equip our stakeholders with the data points they need to do their best work. External data is equally as important. An example could be identifying patients who would be a good fit for our program based on their medical history.
My current focus is on growth and proactively identifying areas of opportunity for more patients to receive Cadence’s care. Additionally, we are building out our reporting capabilities and improving our visibility into key metrics to facilitate data-driven decisions across the company.
2. Why are you passionate about your work at Cadence? What gets you most excited about your job and about the company at large?
The products we're building and the care we provide at Cadence directly contribute to improving the lives of our patients – not to mention reduce physician burden at a time when burnout is top of mind in healthcare. We hear the stories of impact all the time: Whether it's reducing patients’ hospital stays or enabling patients to return to go about their daily lives without shortness of breath, these success stories make our work so rewarding. On a macro level, half of the U.S. adult population has a chronic condition (myself included), and our technology enables world-class care independent of one’s zip code. Being able to serve these patients and improve outcomes while simultaneously bending the cost curve in healthcare is a rare opportunity.
I get excited about both the opportunities and challenges. A key challenge we face is ensuring that Cadence is a win-win for all the key stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem: patients, health systems themselves, and their clinicians. This requires a tight-knit strategy and a continual process of iterating, learning, and improving. Change in any large system is difficult, especially in healthcare, but we are already making great strides!
3. You played a key role in a recent project to showcase heart failure patient outcomes data which we unveiled at HFSA. Tell us about your role with that project and what you learned from the experience.
This was one of my first projects at Cadence. With the help of our clinical team, I led data collection and analysis of outcomes across a large patient cohort, and the results surpassed our own expectations. We demonstrated that a large percentage of Cadence patients have been able to move on to receiving target doses of guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT) – which dramatically improves the likelihood that heart failure patients stay out of the emergency room. That we were able to demonstrate this in such a short time frame is a really important testament to the work our team is doing.
One learning from this project is how unstructured the data and patient charts are in the EMR. As a result, our Product team is now investing in building more scalable and better tools to standardize and improve data collection.
4. How does your role in particular meet the Cadence mission of providing access to consistent, proactive healthcare to more and more people?
At the end of the day, the success of our mission depends on the positive health outcomes we are able to help patients achieve. And collecting patient outcomes data helps us to directly understand the impact we are having, as well as how we can continually improve to best serve our patients.
Sadly, one’s zip code is often the largest determinant of opportunity in our country, and it’s no different with healthcare. One initiative my team is currently working on is cross walking Census data to our service areas to understand how much we are moving the needle when it comes to expanding access to high-quality care.
5. For anyone who's considering joining Cadence, and in particular those in non-clinical roles, what would you tell them about based on your experience?
Being at the forefront of change means navigating uncharted waters. Not all the solutions are neatly arranged, but building solutions that enhance the delivery of care for eventually millions of patients is a mission that gets me up every morning. Behind the scenes, Cadence is a diverse group of people who pride themselves on moving quickly, testing ideas, implementing proofs of concept, and continually improving. We have been able to create real change by partnering with health systems and working directly from the inside out to bring innovation and new technology to this sector.
If you’re interested in learning more about Cadence and current job opportunities, check out our careers page to learn more: https://www.cadence.care/open-roles
