To mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we’re continuing our celebration of the women behind the insights at Health Roundtable.
Our data scientists and analysts work at the intersection of technical expertise and real-world impact - transforming complex methodologies into clear, actionable information that supports better decision-making across the health system. They are the team who bring our data science models to life, provide expert guidance on peering, and help develop new capabilities such as surveillance monitoring.
In this article, we’re introducing Margaret, Senior Data Scientist, and Julie, Data Scientist - two experienced professionals whose curiosity, analytical rigour and passion for exploration help shape how health data is understood and applied across hospitals and health systems.
Name: Margaret Collville
Role: Senior Data Scientist
Years at Health Roundtable: 18
What does a typical day look like for you? It varies a lot, but often it tends to be a mix of diving into the Health Roundtable data to explore questions, and then translating the results of such analysis into language others understand so they know what they are looking at.
Why did you pick this career? I kind of fell into it. I was originally hired by the company while I was still in early undergraduate as a student job: my first task was to write user documentation for a tool they were developing. After the documentation project was complete, my then-boss offered me a number of other tasks to try. It turned out that the activities I most enjoyed were the ones involving delving into the data and explaining how it all works to others. So, I wound up picking university electives that matched my interests: officially my degree didn’t have a data analytics major, so I effectively created my own by selecting a mix of data analytics subjects from the ‘software engineering’ pool.
What excites you about your job? It sounds incredibly nerdy, but I love data analysis; sometimes I even download a new public dataset in my free time, just to play around and explore it. Developing visualisations is a particular passion of mine: converting a column of numbers to a chart and suddenly having an “Aha” moment is just the best feeling. The Health Roundtable has an amazing dataset with infinite possibilities for exploration, and working with it comes with the bonus that you can help hospitals treat their patients, so you get to feel good about it as well.
Name: Julie Sleep
Role: Data Scientist
Years at Health Roundtable: 3.5
What does a typical day look like for you? Each day is different which is what makes this a great field to work in. I get to work on building and evaluating models and indicators, investigating problems, and analysing and reporting on data across different hospitals, countries and patient conditions and procedures.
Why did you pick this career? My academic background is in maths, science and information technology, and for the first part in my career I worked in the University sector, in a diverse range of roles across research, teaching, statistical consulting and IT. While none of my past titles were data analyst or scientist, I was analysing data and writing software in all of them (or teaching others how to) and transferred these skills across to my first role with Health Roundtable as a data analyst, and current role as a data scientist.
What excites you about your job? It is great to be able to play a role in helping hospitals improve patient care through the Health Roundtable platform and benchmarking. I particularly enjoy helping hospitals more directly with custom analyses and reports. With such a detailed and extensive data set that we work with for the Health Roundtable, I get to discover or learn something new every day, so it never gets boring.
