AARON CHAFETZ

Digital Service Expert
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

I’m Aaron Chafetz and am a Digital Service Expert in the Digital Service at CMS) where I work with other civic-minded technologists on transforming how the federal government delivers healthcare to the American people. My work has focused on Medicaid where I serve as the lead for Emmy’s state engagement technical assistance and have designed a number of dynamic reports to help key stakeholders in states and within CMS understand and improve the user experience for our in-house designed app, Emmy. I have gotten to work on fun data projects teaching about on data humanism and working with the Office of Enterprise Data Analytics to improve how public data are communicated.

Before CMS, I was a Senior Economist at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Office of HIV/AIDS, where I specialized in quantitative analysis of global health data. Most of my work was concentrated in analyzing large quantities of data from health facilities and communities around the world, identifying indicator trends and outliers, to inform data drive decision making for leadership and stakeholders within USAID and the interagency space of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

Throughout my tenure, my work largely centered on analyzing large data, designing open source R packages to improve and automate data workflows and pipelines, managing data and data collection processes, advocating with the Agency’s CIO to get the tools in the tech stack that we need, piloting AI to leverage LLM where it makes sense, and heavily applying and teaching data visualization skills plus UI/UX to better communicate data to leadership and stakeholders.

I worked closely with a small team of data scientists and analysts (@USAID-OHA-SI), helping to advance analytics, tools, capacity strenghting, and communication both at headquarters and across our missions. My colleagues and I developed and maintained over ten open source R packages to improve processes and workflows for working with PEPFAR and other HIV data using R, all strongly built off the tidyverse and grounded in principles of reproducibility, transparency and accountability. We designed a R build blocks series based on R for Data Science as well as put on various traininings, but geared towards our headquarters- and mission-base using PEPFAR data and workflows

I’m passionate about data viz and shared my thoughts and inspiration with my teammates in a series called Monday Data Viz and through our office’s data viz style guide, co-developed with Tim Essam and later updated with the help of Amanda Mukulec and Karishma Srikanth.

My public presentations can be found on Speaker Deck, including Post Conf recordings (2022, 2023, 2024). All of my public code can be found on GitHub, on my account, but largely on our team’s organizational account.

Skills

  • R
  • Git
  • Python
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe inDesign
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Tableau
  • Excel
  • Stata
  • SQL

Conferences and External Presentations

  • Posit Conf 2024 • Simple Machines: Improving Workflows with APIs • recording • slides
  • GSA Performance Improvement Council Workshop Series 2023 • Visualizing Data: Using Data to Tell a Story • recording • slides
  • Posit Conf 2023 • Adding a Touch of glitr • recording • slides
  • Posit Conf 2022 • Building a Pit of Success • recording • slides
  • DHIS2 Experts Academy 2018 • Deciphering the Monolith with DATIM 9000 • slides

External Work/Collabs/Support

  • US Department of State
  • US Department of Commerce
  • US Department of Agriculture
  • US General Service Administration
  • US Army Corps of Engineers
  • US Patent and Trade Office
  • US Postal Regulatory Commission
  • New York City Housing Preservation & Development Office
  • George Washington University
  • American University
  • University of Virginia

Links

About This Site

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Disclaimer: The findings, interpretation, and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of my agency. All errors remain my own.