Driving AI in Healthcare

Tiffany D'souza (MBAi ‘22) was a physician in her home country of India. Now she helps improve access to care as a technology leader with healthcare payer AmeriHealth Caritas Family of Companies.

When Tiffany D'souza (MBAi ‘22) talks about using technology to make doctors’ lives easier, she is more familiar than most with their pain points.

D'souza was a general physician in her native India. Today, she is a manager of digital experience and solutions at AmeriHealth Caritas, a healthcare provider that works primarily with Medicaid and Medicare patients.

Her goal is to link her experience from practicing medicine with the business- and-technology-focused education she received through Northwestern's MBAi Program, a joint-degree program offered between the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering.

The end result, if things go according to D'souza’s plan, will be a more streamlined, effective, easy-to-navigate healthcare system for AmeriHealth’s members and providers.

“What brought me to AmeriHealth was the opportunity to bring the two circles of business-tech strategies to healthcare and then drive impact in a place that is helping improve overall health outcomes,” said D'souza, who joined AmeriHealth in 2024. “Hopefully one day it could lead to a policy shift in healthcare in general.”

D'souza spent six years training in India to work as a doctor — part of that time included a stint as medical coordinator for the Justin Bieber Purpose Tour. She realized her passion for technology and moved to Philadelphia to be a clinical fellow and clinical lead in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals.

As she wanted to further combine her passion for healthcare and technology, she began to explore Northwestern University, where her brother Rhett was in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) program.

When she read about the MBAi program, D'souza realized she found her bridge from medicine to business and technology.

“I knew I needed to learn how to drive an idea at the enterprise level, how to implement it, what the right idea was to start with, and what the strategy behind what we were doing was all about,” she said. “When information about MBAi landed in my inbox, I was like, ‘This is ideal!”

The program turned out to be even more ideal than she expected. D'souza knew she would learn from some of the most accomplished instructors in the industry. What she didn’t know was how much learning would come from outside the classroom.

“My cohort group was phenomenal — just being around people who are interested in not just AI or not just business, but both,” she said. “It was nice to be around people who wanted to talk about AI all the time. Learning from that peer group was just fantastic.”

D'souza now finds herself applying what she learned in the MBAi program to AmeriHealth Caritas on a daily basis.

Her main focus is to help improve the provider experience with the company. That means investigating every type of possible technological upgrade that could make accessing care and working with payers more streamlined.

“I spend a lot of time doing digital discovery strategy,” she said. “MBAi taught me how, if we're implementing an AI solution, a lot of other areas are affected.Those downstream impacts can impact everything.”

Identifying and implementing that big-picture approach is exactly why D'souza turned to the MBAi program. Today, she is happy to be back in the healthcare space — albeit in a different role.

She credits MBAi with helping her get where she is today.

“I am super passionate about healthcare,” she said. “The world is a place with a lot of humans and a lot of people who need to have easy access to care, and that's what drew me to medicine. I really wanted to drive this access using smart technology solutions, and MBAi was a slam dunk. It was the exact program I was looking for.”