What I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Career in Health Informatics
In the series of newsletters, I have written about the importance of designing your own healthcare data analyst portfolio project and developing your technical skills with SQL and a data visualization tool such as Power BI. The last skill I wanted to highlight is the importance of communication skills in the healthcare analyst role. It is key to be able to communicate your technical insights to a large audience who might not have a technical background.
Oftentimes you will be the “Analytical translator” this is a term that was coined from a McKinsey article that describes the healthcare data analyst role to the tee. One day you might be meeting with clinicians who would like you to develop a report or dashboard that helps them to better track certain clinical metrics. Another day you might have to meet with a developer to communicate the insights of the clinicians and work with them to build a solution.
Lack of communication and understanding of your target audience is a big reason why data products can fail. If you want people to integrate dashboards or reports into their jobs, it’s not enough to design a superior tool we also need to have conversations with end-users, to ensure we have uncovered potential pitfalls.
Questions to ask end-users:
How will this report/dashboard help you to do your job more effectively?
What are the top 3 benefits you want to see, as a result of this report/dashboard being implemented?
What processes do you already have in place to record your key performance indicators?
What are the biggest pain points you have currently when collecting key performance indicators?
Understanding how end-users will be using the tool on a day-to-day basis, how this tool will be integrated into their jobs, and what value it will provide to them is necessary information to understand, before designing your dashboard.
This process might require multiple interviews and meetings initially but will save you time in the long run. I have built several reports and dashboards which have ended up rarely used, despite hours of work, because I didn’t identify the needs of my audience.
In addition, understanding why they need this tool built can help you to whittle down the scope of what you need to build. Depending on their answers, they might need a quick superficial overview of metrics that can be designed as a one-page report or they might be a more involved user and will need real-time analysis of clinical metrics therefore, a dashboard with multiple tabs might be a better option.
I go over key communication skills you will want to obtain for your next job search in my course: Learn the Skills to Get Your First Role as a Healthcare Analyst which will go live tomorrow 😊 Have questions you want to ask me specifically? I will be going live tomorrow on my YouTube channel [here] at 12 PM EST, get your questions answered in the chat!
Best,
Alana
Resources
Interested in learning more about how you can become a healthcare analyst? Join me at 6 PM EST on Tuesday, February 20th! Please register here:
In this free workshop, I will provide context on a typical day in the life of someone working in the health informatics field, as a healthcare data analyst, and will highlight key technical and soft skills used in this role. I will then review common skills outlined in job descriptions and go over some popular interview questions and tips on how to format your resume, to improve your chances of getting your dream role!
Job Posting: Project Lead
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