Rae Wang scales healthcare analytics from regional wins to national systems

Rae Wang, an associate director at Optum, is building healthcare analytics capabilities that can move from local success to nationwide use. Her work centers on standardizing data, improving consistency and using automation and AI to support medical expense, affordability and operations decisions.

Why it matters: - Healthcare analytics often break down when regional solutions have to operate across different data systems, vendors and business processes. - Rae Wang’s work at Optum focuses on turning local analytics wins into reusable capabilities that can support larger-scale decisions across medical expense, affordability and healthcare operations. - Stronger data infrastructure and automation can reduce repetitive work and expand the reach of analytics teams.

What happened: - Rae Wang is an associate director at Optum leading a team that works across medical expense, end-to-end affordability, medical management and clinical operational analytics. - Wang’s current work centers on taking analytics approaches that worked in regional operations and building the infrastructure, products and frameworks to expand them nationwide. - Influential Women highlighted Wang in a profile published Oct. 7, 2026.

The details: - Wang said scaling analytics is not about copying the same solution everywhere, but about deciding what should be standardized and what should remain flexible. - Her work includes standardizing business definitions and metrics, improving data consistency, consolidating fragmented reporting and building analytical products that can adapt across healthcare functions. - Wang approaches recurring problems as systems issues, with an emphasis on redesigning underlying processes instead of fixing the same issue one case at a time. - Automation is part of that strategy because it can reduce manual work and make analytical processes more consistent and scalable. - Wang sees artificial intelligence as useful only when the underlying data foundation is strong enough to support it. - She said clean data matters, but context matters just as much, and AI becomes more useful when the system already understands the problem it is solving. - Wang’s career in healthcare analytics began in graduate school, when she placed second nationally in the 2020 Humana–Mays Healthcare Analytics Case Competition. - That result led to an internship at Humana and later a full-time role working on predictive modeling, automated reporting and executive analytics for pharmacy and healthcare operations. - Wang’s background now spans analytics strategy, product development, operational performance, data integration and leadership. - She earned a Master of Science in Business Analytics from the USC Marshall School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from the University of Washington Foster School of Business, where she studied finance and marketing. - Her family background in medicine and healthcare helped shape an early interest in the field, even though her own path came through analytics and technology.

Between the lines: - Wang’s approach reflects a broader shift in healthcare analytics: technical output alone is not enough if the analysis is hard to trust, hard to explain or disconnected from a business decision. - Her emphasis on asking why, not only how, points to a future where analytics professionals are valued less for execution alone and more for framing problems and communicating results. - The combination of standardization, automation and AI suggests a move toward analytics systems that are designed for reuse, not one-off fixes.

What's next: - Wang plans to keep building scalable analytics capabilities across medical expense, affordability and healthcare operations. - Her focus will remain on stronger data infrastructure, automation and AI that can extend successful solutions beyond a single market or use case. - She also aims to help analytics professionals develop stronger critical thinking, problem framing, communication and data storytelling skills.

The bottom line: - Wang’s work is about turning healthcare analytics from a regional service into a durable operating system for national-scale decision-making.

More information: Learn more about Rae Wang’s profile