The Health Informatics Roadmap
Journey to the Healthcare Data Analyst Role
In this newsletter, I am going to go over from start to finish a potential route to getting your first role as a healthcare data analyst.
⚠️ But before we dive into this! ⚠️
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TLDR; (too long didn’t read) check out the video instead, if you prefer to watch vs. read
Most people believe that all you need to get a job in the health informatics field is a relevant degree but the truth is you should get some form of experience. Generic advice would be to get a degree at any college or university in Computer Science or Health Informatics and then when you get out you will magically be able to get a role. This might have been the case in the past but these days, the job market is challenging, to say the least, and a degree is not a guarantee that you will get a role in your desired field.
However, a degree in addition to other factors might significantly increase your chance of getting an entry-level role in this field. Before spending thousands of dollars on any program you will want to do a significant amount of research before committing to a program.
Step 1: Identify the key skills listed in healthcare analyst job roles and determine if the degree program you want to apply to will teach you these skills
Some of the common soft and technical skills requested for healthcare data analyst roles are:
Knowledge of SQL programming language to query relational databases.
Experience with visualization tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, etc.…
Experience working with large clinical datasets including manipulating, maintaining, preparing data, and presenting analyses and reports for different audiences.
Ability to work both independently and in teams
Therefore, when searching for a degree program you want to read up on the course syllabus and see if in the course description you will be taught how to write SQL queries, database concepts, and data visualization skills using up-to-date tools such as Power BI and Tableau. You should do your due diligence to make sure you will be learning tools that are used in industry and not tools that are specific to academia or are outdated.
Another tip is to reach out to alumni of the program on LinkedIn because oftentimes these programs will highlight past students. Ask them if you can have a few minutes of their time to ask them what they thought about the value of the degree program, how long it took them to find a job in their field, and if they felt the program advisor was helpful in their job search. I have received several questions and comments from listeners of the Health Analytic Insights Podcast who went through these expensive degree programs, struggled to find jobs and advisors would not help them or left them completely on their own.
Obtaining your degree is a huge time and cost investment and unless you want to stay in academia and become a professor, the outcome should be to find a job, so you want to optimize your time as much as possible by learning things that will be relevant during a job interview.
Step 1B: If you have prior experience and you are pivoting into this field find ways to job shadow
You might have prior experience working as a clinician, project manager or business analyst and want to pivot into the healthcare data analyst role. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the first option be to immediately go get another degree as you already have key transferrable skills that can help you to pivot into this field. In this scenario, you might need to work on expanding your network and self-learning any technical skills you might be missing. For example, if you already have a background as a data analyst in the hospitality industry the skills you might have used to analyze large amounts of data might be relevant as a healthcare data analyst. If you previously worked as a project manager in another industry your skills might be transferrable when implementing a new electronic health record system at a hospital.
In this situation, you might just need to learn how to write basic SQL queries or learn Power BI. This might be done by reaching out to a coworker in your existing organization who might work in the Business Intelligence or Decision Support Department and asking them how to best learn these skills.
Step 2: Gap Analysis Learn the Technical Skills
Once you have determined you have a technical skill gap based on what common skills are listed in the healthcare data analyst role, it's time to fill this gap! You can do this by attending a degree program which will teach you these skills or self-learning.
One of the best ways to learn and retain information instead of just passively reading it from a textbook, or even watching a YouTube video, is to practice the skills you are learning. This is why I would suggest bridging this gap by creating a project that has you practicing these technical skills. When I was developing my technical skills, one area that I found missing was a lack of online courses highlighting a clinical problem (e.g., determining re-admission rates back to hospitals). There are several analytical courses out there but I couldn’t find anything that could help me to gain experience working with a clinical dataset so that I could practice my technical skills and build a portfolio project that would be relevant for hiring managers during the healthcare data analyst interview.
After years of experience in this field, I ended up creating the course: Learn the Skills to Get Your First Role as a Healthcare Analyst, which helps you to create an analytical project from start to finish while getting exposed to common clinical metrics in the field.
Step 3: Prepare for the Interview
Once you feel confident in your now-developed technical and soft skills you are ready to prepare your resume and get ready for the interview. When it comes to the main body of your resume, make sure to use action verbs to highlight any previous work experience or project work you have done. For instance, include examples of your work experience using quantitative data (e.g. created reports and dashboards for the emergency department, which helped to reduce patient readmission rates by 20%) and highlight ways you made a significant difference at your previous organization.
If you have no experience in this field, try to highlight any relevant skills, capstone projects or courses you have completed, which showcase your passion for advancing in the field, you can do this at the top of your resume, in the resume summary, and in your cover letter. Relevant internship or co-op experience can go above your degree if your degree is unrelated to healthcare analytics.
Step 4: Always Keep Learning
This field is rapidly changing and keeping informed is important with the latest emerging trends, especially with how artificial intelligence will be integrated into the healthcare field in the future. Keep reading books, listen to podcasts and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Speaking of continuously learning, I recently was listening to an interesting podcast episode from The Joe Reis Show on the growing skills gap in data. The host mentions that people need to go back to learning the basics and not lean on the growing suite of self-service Business Intelligence tools. I agree with the importance of learning the basics, one thing I wanted to highlight is that I don’t think we should put the onus solely on people new to the field to take this up. From my perspective, I would say that:
a) People don’t know where to start to learn the basics because of the lack of mentoring opportunities available (most people are doing the job of 2 or 3 people and are overwhelmed and have limited time to help train junior staff)
From the above poll I launched, some of my community members also agree that “Lack of mentorship opportunities” has been a barrier they have encountered during their career
b) Some companies expect that staff should come in knowing every skill known to mankind
These days you might have to create your own blueprint or roadmap of resources and skills, to self-teach yourself the basics. I hope this health informatics roadmap is of benefit to you on your journey!
Resources
The new year is a great time to start thinking about and researching potential summer internships, check out this list of Summer 2025 internships here
Health Data Science Black Internship Programme 2025 here
2025 SMDP Biotech & MedTech Mentorship opportunity here