Why “arete”?
Arete is an ancient Greek word that is often loosely translated as personal excellence.
However, arete isn’t just excellence, although that is certainly part of it.
It’s active. It’s effective. It’s community-minded.
It’s not a state of being - it’s exercising your full potential, being effective at what you do, and doing it not for yourself but for the good of your polis - or as we may say, community. It’s the difference between “I’m a good person” and “I am actively doing good.” Or, to quote one of my favourite college-era films - “it’s not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you.”
Once upon a time, I was a nerdy 19 year old college kid studying political philosophy, and the role of arete in the ancient Greek polis was my major research project. From Thucydides to Aristotle, I was trying to capture
precisely what this word really meant in day-to-day life.
Now, a couple decades on, I’m a nerdy data scientist and researcher, and when I was considering what I wanted to communicate about who I am, what I do, and what I aspire to, this old paper came to mind.
This - actively demonstrating excellence with intention, developing and leveraging all the best skills and tools we possess, on behalf of improving life for all - perfectly captured the vision for who I want to be and the work that I do.
So here we are - Arete Data Labs - actively and effectively demonstrating our excellence via our data science, research, program evaluation, statistics, and analytics offerings, all toward transforming healthcare for the good of patients and communities.
Our values
A few of our defining traits and what we strive to be:
We pride ourselves on being data detectives - we get “deep in the weeds” with your data to ensure its quality and relevance to the questions you need to answer, uncovering gaps and challenges and figuring out solutions.
We are committed to health equity and to ethics - particularly critical in the midst of the drive to harness machine learning and AI applications. Behind every number is a real person, and we keep that centered in what we do, with an attentiveness to the rights of patients and to the very real disparities that impact our systems and communities.
Effectiveness is a value that permeates everything. We want to help find solutions that are the most effective for patient outcomes, the best use of available resources, and the most efficient.
Strict standards of excellence - if we don’t know something, we’re not afraid to say so but then go figure it out! We are committed to the most robust methodological approaches, to the integrity of the data we use, to transparency and accountability. There’s no cutting corners or “just get it out the door” - we believe in timeliness and quality combined.
We love getting creative - we aren’t just here to copy and paste code, we want to think critically with you about what will best serve your organization and your patients and innovate cool and exciting things that can make a difference.
