Jonathan Giuffrida
Jonathan Giuffrida, MPP'15

HOMETOWN:

Richmond, Virginia

CURRENT ROLE:

System Manager of Community Benefit, Presence Health

UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE:

Bachelor’s in classics, Princeton University

PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT:

  • Program and Development Director, Network 20/20
  • Analyst, First Manhattan Consulting Group

As a financial consultant in New York, Jonathan Giuffrida was doing the kind of number crunching and data analysis that was good for business, but not for his heart.

Though he was acquiring new skills in statistics, databases, and data science, Giuffrida began searching for ways to apply what he knew in the service of public good.

“Our clients were banks, and the work I did helped them make more money,” Giuffrida says. “I realized that is not how I wanted to spend my days.”

He left his job and enrolled at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy to build a toolkit that would allow him to make a greater impact in the world. Giuffrida, MPP’15, sought a rigorous quantitative foundation that his few high school and college math courses and his undergraduate degree in the classics did not provide.

The tale of his graduate school experience is one of resourcefulness. Much like his financial consultant days when he’d search the Internet to teach himself tasks, Giuffrida cast a wide net to deepen his understanding of data analysis. Outside of the classroom he invested time to teach himself material or find people willing to help him learn.

Giuffrida parlayed his experience to become the system manager for community benefit at Presence Health, a health system with 150 locations across Illinois, including 10 hospitals and 27 long-term care and senior living facilities. His role is to ask how Presence Health’s hospitals make the communities around them better. He uses his career path as an example and as guidance for the students he mentors in the Harris Mentor Program.

“You can learn in a classroom, but often the people who go the furthest have an idea of how the world works,” he says. “You don’t need a PhD in statistics to run a really good analysis. You need to ask the right questions. What you learn in a place like Harris is how policy touches real people. Often that leads you to ask questions that haven’t been asked before.”

In Giuffrida’s role at Presence Health, he does geospatial analysis to focus on the people who live in communities surrounding Presence Health sites, not only its existing patients. His guiding principle: what can they do to make communities healthier and safer places to live before people need to turn to the hospital for treatment? The focus isn’t on rare diseases, but instead on known threats such as asthma and diabetes.

Giuffrida is part of the emerging field of taking a statistical approach to identifying social determinants of health and using existing research to build models and algorithms and identify potential solutions given limited budget resources.

“We look at the prevalence of diabetes and heart conditions, and we also try to understand the interaction of those things with the social determinants of health. A lot of it comes from your home, your income, and whether you’re in a food desert.”

Giuffrida is the only person at Presence Health doing such community-focused quantitative analysis and has built relationships with people across the country who do similar work. He turns to his peers when he wants to discuss approaches.

“It’s a new frontier but sometimes you don’t know what direction you’re supposed to go next,” he says. “There are only a handful of others who are working on this in health care.”

Giuffrida has mentored Harris students since he graduated and says it is important for students to hear from alumni who have more recently completed their degrees.

“For Harris students, it’s not just about what they can do and the kind of career they can have, but also about how they navigate hard problems in the world and make it a better place. That’s why it’s important to have a mentor. The relationship between a student's skills and possible trajectories are there, but they're not always easy to see. Having a mentor who has already navigated that path can illuminate the possibilities.”

Some of the most important lessons he learned while at Harris he uses in his work today.

“It’s not just about running a regression, and it’s not just about being able to understand what a regression is,” he says. “It’s about ‘What is missing here? What did the author not consider? Or what are they trying to hide? It’s about teaching us the skepticism to do our jobs better.”

He also reminds students who don’t have extensive quantitative backgrounds that it is possible to be successful in data-centered careers.

“I didn’t really have any quantitative background when I came to Harris,” he says. “I feel that it is encouraging that I am basically doing statistics and programming in my job. I don’t want people to think I’m a computer genius. The most I did (before Harris) was Excel. Everything else I did I taught myself. You can learn it as you go along.”

So, after years of searching, Giuffrida has found his purpose and a way to crunch numbers with heart.