Derrick Higgins, PhD
Vice President, Data Science & AI Solutions, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC)
Dr. Derrick Higgins is Vice President of Data Science and AI Solutions at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) where he leads development of intelligent capabilities for payer operations ranging from risk stratification and health care management to payment integrity and utilization management. His division serves as a center of excellence, facilitating collaboration, providing governance, and assembling data science best practices for the enterprise. Dr. Higgins is also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Previously, Dr. Higgins led the innovation unit at the American Family Insurance (AmFam) Data Science and Analytics Lab in Chicago, where his team developed new products and services based on text, imagery and IoT data in the property and casualty (P&C) domain. Prior to joining AmFam, Dr. Higgins was lead data scientist at Civis Analytics, and used deep learning to uncover latent factors in political discussions on social media. Before that, he was the Director of NLP and Speech Research at Educational Testing Service, where he and his team developed tools for analyzing student responses that are now used in leading testing programs around the world, including the GRE and TOEFL exams.
Dr. Higgins earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2002.