How I Became a Data Analyst in Healthcare

for me becoming a data analyst was a process that took me four years wait what four years yes that's correct four years in this video I'm gonna explain how I stumbled into clinical data analytics and what I learned from some of my blunders along the way [Music] so I have just graduated from a four-year University except I spent five years doing it I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Science in biology at the time I didn't know what SQL or Tableau was I didn't even know that I wanted to be a data analyst all I knew was Excel which I was pretty good at and that eventually helped me get a job that would be a nice precursor to data analytics but more on that later now at the time I wanted to be a doctor and so I Was preparing to apply to medical schools but I didn't have good grades in my science classes I was only interested in a highly competitive branch of medicine and I was too broke to even apply to medical schools so I took a break and I went to a job fair my friends with computer science degrees all got jobs super easily I struggled to get hired anywhere in fact the only place that would hire me was a company called scribe stat this was a company that hired college students to learn how to use an electronic medical record system called epic that's used in hospitals I would then provide technical assistance to doctors needing assistance in navigating or a troubleshooting epic in the hospital so I took the job and before I could start I had to get my training so they gave me like one hour of training and then my boss said all right you're going to be at the beck and call of any doctor that needs help in the hospital and they have more training than you and they're probably going to be mad and you're going to be doing this for three months starting on day one when we go live good luck so that went as well as you might expect on day one I was a deer in the headlights I was trying to help where I could but I really wasn't helping and that continued for the next couple of weeks it was super intimidating I was dealing with doctors that were frequently yelling at the computer and sometimes yelling at me little did I know that I was witnessing a process that was unfolding across the whole country believe it or not until the last decade most hospitals did not have an electronic medical records system and it was difficult to store patient records in mass in a digitalized format it was a trial by fire but it was a very important experience in that it helped me get used to working with doctors and it helped me get used to Epic which would be important later on I also made the realization that I did not want to be a doctor especially after seeing how stressful their jobs could be but I knew that I still wanted to work in healthcare because I still found it very intriguing and I loved the idea of helping patients so my job with that company was coming to an end because it was only a three-month stint so I applied to 200 jobs and I heard back from one job that job was for a data abstractor position at my University now data abstractors simply means data entry but specifically in healthcare the combination of my epic experience with Excel is what really helped me get that job in this role I was tasked with pulling out specific information out of a patient's meta record and then entering that into a data portal or data registry I would pull information like what kind of comorbidities did this patient have like diabetes was this patient a smoker did they have certain antibiotics prior to surgery did they have complications after surgery like sepsis or surgical site infections I got to learn medical Concepts and terminologies in a lot of different branches of surgery like weight loss surgery general surgery heart surgery lung surgery I did this for a couple years then I started to get really bored of that so I was looking for something new in healthcare and I had only a vague notion of what I wanted to do then I attended a seminar at my University where someone talked about how hundreds of thousands of patients die every year as a result of avoidable medical errors and that really intrigued me and I knew that I wanted to do something about that but I didn't know how so I looked into getting a master's in health administration degree I thought hey maybe I could help with this if I became a manager or an administrator in a house hospital and they make good money so why not so I applied to my university masters of Health Administration program and I interviewed and I was offered a position that program would cost me seventy thousand dollars so I decided to work part-time to somewhat offset the costs of tuition in the mha program I learned about legal issues in health care critical issues in public health the Finance and Accounting side of Health Care using statistics to improve processes in a hospital my favorite subject though is quality improvement and patient safety and it was the thing that I wanted to learn the most about while I was in the program and we also did a lot of presentations like every week and every project and presentation we did we did it in a team that we were assigned to from the very beginning of the program it was in this program that I learned that data is extremely crucial to the day-to-day workings of a hospital we were given a lot of assignments involving data and I loved those assignments because I had a lot of experience in Excel I became known as the data guy on my team then after the first year was over we were required to do summer internships so I took a job at a rural Hospital in the quality improvement Department as this was my favorite subject while I was in that internship one of my friends that was also working there at the time said hey Josh you love data have you ever heard of Tableau and I said no Tableau what's that never heard of it so I went to the Tableau website that night and I downloaded a free trial of Tableau and I started dabbling with it I connected it to a data set that I was using at the time and I was just blown away by what it could do within 30 minutes I managed to create this map that had this gradient density of how many people lived in certain zip codes and what chronic conditions they had it was at that point that I knew that I wanted to do that for the rest of my career and I knew that that little dashboard that I built in 30 minutes could get me a job somewhere now before I move on if you like this video so far please consider hitting that like button that'll help my channel grow and it will also help me know if I'm providing the right content to you so now it's the second year of the mha program and I start developing a better appreciation for the issues in healthcare and how data can be used to help solve those issues and this is where I really started to intensify my efforts to do something with data I use Tableau more often in my presentations at this point I I really started to realize that what I wanted to be was a data analyst and that I needed one more skill to become a data analyst and that was SQL so I dabbled in SQL as well and I learned it at a website called sqlzoo.net but there was one problem the mha program wasn't really designed to train people to become data analysts it was more geared towards people who wanted to become managers or administrators I came to the realization that I love data but I did not love the idea of becoming a manager or an administrator so then I thought hmm what do I do now so I talked to my faculty mentor and he referred me to one of his former students who also loved data that worked at a local hospital she worked in the quality improvement department so I reached out to her and asked her if she could meet with me to do an informational interview and in that informational interview she talked about the work that she did with her team to improve patient safety and the quality of care in clinical processes things like how do we detect and treat sepsis as rapidly and effectively as possible or how do we ensure that newborns and their mothers are receiving the safest patient care possible basically figuring out what are we doing wrong in our treatment of patients and how can we do better all of that requires a lot of data analysis so after the Q a she told me that she had a job opening for a quality consultant position I told her that I would apply and then she fast-tracked me into the interview process I prepared a whole week for That interview so I was really prepared and I had a tableau portfolio to show the hiring manager during the interview that portfolio looked like garbage and being a fresh graduate with little to no experience before applying to that job I was really under qualified for it and was cautiously optimistic but that little tiny amount of Tableau experience that I had combined with my preparation for the interview was enough to actually get me the job and I was offered it the very next day so I start this job and I start working on these Tableau projects just like I had hoped but I still wasn't actually a data analyst at this point I was a consultant and my role is to meet with doctors and clinicians to figure out weaknesses in the clinical process how to measure those things and how to improve them so a few months later into that job the only data analyst in that department announces that she is resigning let's call her Sean so my boss calls me into her office and says Josh Sean is quitting we need someone to fill this data analyst position you like data do you want to be the new data analyst and so at that point I was just over the moon because I realized this was my golden ticket to start doing data analytics and making a career out of this so I said yes and then Sean trained me on all of the data processes that she managed in the hospital and because I had already known a little bit of SQL combined with a lot of knowledge of Tableau and Excel I was able to pretty quickly adapt to the job and several jobs later here I am still doing the work that I love all right so that was a pretty long road that I traveled and although I am happy for those experiences I probably would have done things a little bit differently if I were to go back in time I would have probably double majored in computer science and public health when I was an undergrad and that way I would have probably saved myself an extra two years and seventy thousand dollars computer science is a very versatile degree you can work in software engineering data analytics and that public health exposure would have given me a nice competitive advantage over people that didn't have that domain knowledge I also probably would have spent that time in my undergrad learning tools like Tableau power bi and SQL so that I was ready to hit the ground running when I applied to those jobs in the end my Master's in health administration equipped me with a ton of business knowledge about health care and hospitals and it does give me a nice competitive advantage over other candidates when I'm applying to different hospitals so if you decide to go back to school and get your master's degree just be aware aware that it's very costly so you're going to have to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze also keep in mind that unless you're very serious about pursuing Health Care as an industry there's probably better degrees out there for you than an mha degree for example an MBA is way more versatile and it could land you in probably just about any industry you want now if you're a data analyst in healthcare I'm super curious to hear how you ended up doing data analytics so if you're comfortable sharing that leave that in the comments down below well thank you everyone so much for watching if you aren't sure where to start in your analytics journey I have a couple videos that you can get started on I also have much more content on the way so do hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it and with that I'll see you in another video

Channel: Data Wizardry

Views: 19,902

Keywords: Healthcare analytics, Healthcare, analytics, Tableau, Application of Healthcare Analytics, Python, SQL, Healthcare Data Analyst, Career Advice, Healthcare Technology, Data science, Clinical Data Analyst, Business Intelligence Analyst, Data Analytics in Healthcare Industry, Data Nerd, Data Wizardry, healthcare analytics, healthcare data analyst, data analyst in healthcare, data careers, data analytics in healthcare industry, applications of healthcare analytics

Id: s15X30BAfe8

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023