I’m at the CHIME Fall Forum event in San Antonio and there’s no doubt that healthcare analytics is on the mind of pretty much all of the healthcare CIO’s that are present at the event. EHR was about capturing the data. Now we’re entering the phase where healthcare organizations look to extract value out of that data. This is what healthcare analytics is all about.
In one discussion I was in, they talked about the challenge of hiring a qualified healthcare analytics professional. One person argued that they’re really hard to find and when you do find them you have to pay them $150k to get them to come work for you. Of course, they were from Boston so you can do your own cost of living adjustment. Although, if you’re not in Boston, you might have an even harder time finding the right healthcare analytics professionals in your area.
The discussion then led to whether you should really hire a healthcare analytics professional at all. Instead, it was suggested that it might be best to hire a mathmetician that’s really great at processing data. They won’t have the same bias as a healthcare professional has as they start looking at the data. They’ll just follow the numbers and see where the numbers lead them.
Many agreed that this was a good idea, but also suggested that the mathmetician needed to be paird with a SME (subject matter expert). In some ways, this is the same story about hiring qualifications versus talent. Although, it turns out in this case that the lack of healthcare experience might be an added benefit.
Hi, John. Great post. Just going to plug my field here if you don’t mind.
Statisticians make the best data analysts. And those working in Business Intelligence should be able to transfer the skills to health/clinical data analysis rather easily (eg: dashboards, descriptive stats, regression and prediction, visualization, sql, excel).
Statisticians know that in order to work with the data (numbers) they must learn the nature and context of the subject area, so like you said, it may be good to pair him/her with a subject area expert. Someone with a master’s in public health, perhaps?
Hi Gonzalo,
You’re right. Statisticians are great too. I kind of grouped them into the broader mathematician, but they are a bit different and another similar option that could work for many organizations.