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Ashley van Heteren

Expert Associate PartnerAmsterdã

Harnesses advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to help clients deliver sustainable innovation

Ashley is part of Digital McKinsey and a leader in the firm’s Healthcare Systems & Services and Pharmaceuticals & Medical Products Practices. She brings years of experience in applying digital and advanced-analytical techniques to innovation across the healthcare value chain. She engages patients, practitioners, institutions, and industry leaders to develop innovative wraparound digital services and solutions.

Ashley is also a core leader in Noble Intelligence, McKinsey’s initiative on artificial intelligence (AI) for social good. This team uses analytics technology and AI to address humanitarian crises, such as helping victims of natural disasters and addressing long-term unemployment. She works with colleagues, communities, and industry leaders to develop and deploy innovative applications to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Examples of Ashley’s recent work include the following:

  • transforming a pharmaceutical company’s global physician-engagement system to make it more personalized and customer focused through digital technology, AI-based insights, and agile optimization techniques
  • developing and launching a digital ecosystem of patient services and solutions for a pharmaceutical multinational in only five months
  • identifying new, digitally enabled products and services for a global consumer-driven medical-technology company
  • using analytics and AI techniques, including natural-language processing, journey mapping, and causal-inference modeling to improve aftercare services for survivors of human trafficking
  • improving natural-disaster response, using AI-based image recognition and building-damage classification

Published work

AI for social good: Improving lives and protecting the planet, McKinsey & Company, May 2024

Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and ferocity. Here’s how AI can come to the rescue,” World Economic Forum, January 2020

Using AI to help achieve Sustainable Development Goals,” UN Development Programme, January 2019

Applying artificial intelligence for social good,” McKinsey & Company, November 2018

Experience

Erasmus MC
Visiting researcher, cancer chemotherapeutics

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Technology fellow, radiation studies branch

Education

Duke University
PhD, medical physics

Georgia Institute of Technology
BS, nuclear and radiological engineering