Jay Rajda, Aetna

Fairly or no, insurers have traditionally been tagged as technology laggards — which, given the glacial pace of change for the industry as a whole, is saying something of note. 

That has started to change in recent years, and few execs embody today’s spirit of innovation to the extent that Jay Rajda does. Rajda, who previously worked within Aetna’s innovation lab and who now holds the joint title of chief clinical transformation officer and senior medical director for clinical innovation and health and clinical services, has been quick to evangelize telehealth solutions. 

Two years ago, on Aetna’s blog, he described with great enthusiasm a pilot that allowed Aetna members to contact their primary care physicians through video conferencing. Rajda, however, remains very much a skeptic, pointing out that the mere accumulation of data is not an end unto itself. 

“Value is generated from interventions, not from data analytics itself,” Rajda told Managed Healthcare Executive. In the same interview, he discussed how Aetna has devised patient-modeling techniques to predict the occurrence of metabolic syndromes. 

“This enabled us to develop targeted intervention programs that are likely to be most successful at reducing the incidence of metabolic syndrome at the population level,” Rajda said of the video-conferencing initiative.