Top 4 Skills for Healthcare Analysts
Following up on the last newsletter, I went over why you should care about creating a healthcare data analyst portfolio project. In this newsletter, I want to provide an overview of common skills as a healthcare analyst. If you start to look at enough job descriptions for roles as a healthcare analyst within the health informatics field the below common skills are often repeated:
We often get the same advice when it comes to working on our resumes “SHOW don’t TELL” This can look like applying a combination of action verbs and metrics (e.g., “developed a dashboard which helped to reduce cesarean section rates across the hospital unit by 10%, from the previous year”).
With these above common skills, skills such as experience with data visualization tools, SQL, or strong communication skills can be subjective and difficult to measure your proficiency. If you are looking for a role as a healthcare analyst your hiring manager might be someone who also has an analytical mindset and wants to be able to quantify your skills. I have reviewed several resumes where skills such as SQL, Power BI, and R are just listed but don’t go into detail about how these technical tools were applied during projects. This makes it difficult for hiring managers to understand your proficiency with these skills, and in this job market, you don’t want hiring managers to have to guess if you have the necessary skills for the role.
Showcasing that you can build a project from start to finish using technical tools such as Excel, Power BI, or SQL and being able to communicate your insights on how you went about the process from start to finish can help hiring managers get an accurate sense of your skill level.
Where should you start when building a portfolio project?
If you are applying to a specific healthcare organization or hospital you want to do some research on the organization’s website to understand what is the mission/vision of the organization and therefore, what metrics are of importance to them. For example, are they focused on reducing re-admission rates back to the hospital? Are they focused on reducing health inequities by improving social determinants of health for patients, by partnering with differing community organizations?
If you are unable to find the mission of the organization or don’t have a specific organization you want to apply to, here are some common metrics that most healthcare organizations track:
The clinical dashboard that I showed in the first newsletter contains these metrics, stay tuned to learn more about how you can build this dashboard yourself and get experience building a healthcare data analyst portfolio project from start to finish!
Best,
Alana
Open Source Healthcare Datasets
#ProjectHealthViz
#ProjectHealthViz Datasets
SyntheaDataset
Kaggle
HealthData.gov