Kathe Fox

Kathe Fox, ’81 Ph.D., Ex officio serves as President of the Board of Directors of the Association of Yale Alumni in Public Health (AYAPH). Kathe, an Informatics Consultant, has more than 30 years’ experience in healthcare Informatics with a particular emphasis on chronic disease epidemiology, research methods and evaluation, and big data and data integration. Recently retired from Aetna, Kathe is currently devoting her energies to service in support of public health and emerging technology companies that are grounded in healthcare data and insights. She is the President of the Association of Yale Alumni in Public Health and President of the Board of the Health Care Cost Institute.

At Aetna, Kathe was a member of the Analytics and Behavior Change organization where she led the Informatics activities that support Plan Sponsor analyses and tools. Recently Kathe led the design and assessment of provider and network services including the assessment and monitoring of Aetna’s Joint Venture partners. Kathe also helped manage data governance for external release of Aetna data for research. In 2016 Kathe won the Aetna Innovator of the Year Award and the Aetna Chairman’s Award for her Health/Wealth product idea.

From 2012 – 2020 Kathe worked closely with the Harvard Medical School, specifically the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Health Policy, and encouraged and supported the growth of clinical and policy research using health insurance claims data. Harvard and Aetna built a multi-year data enclave that offered claims experience on 70+ M members over ten years. Researchers used these data to investigate questions ranging from the efficacy of preventive screening to the inheritability of autism. These data, and the associated analytic techniques, have been introduced to medical students as part of their training.

Prior to joining Aetna, Kathe was Vice President and Practice Leader for Health Plan customers at Medstat (now IBM Health) where she was responsible for analytic and consulting solutions for the managed care market. She also led a number of federal contracts including the CMS Medicaid Encounter Data Quality and Performance Measurement project and an AHRQ Medical Errors Reporting Implementation Plan.

Kathe holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (Department of Epidemiology and Public Health) and a B.A. in History from Skidmore College. From 1985 – 87 she was a Robert Wood Johnson Faculty Fellow in Healthcare Finance at Johns Hopkins. She is a Lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of ActivateCare and Scipher Medicine.