Are you interested in how data can drive important decisions that help hundreds or even thousands of people? If so, you might consider a career in healthcare analytics. Overall, analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and decision making applied to meaningful patterns in data. Analytics has been experiencing robust growth in healthcare, and the medical field increasingly relies on analytics to guide key clinical and business decisions.
As a healthcare analytics professional, you would use specialized techniques and software - combined with industry knowledge - to guide some of the most important decisions impacting the health and wellbeing of thousands of people every day.
Industry Wide Applications
From investigative research to medical centre management, the amount of digital data in healthcare has exploded over the last few decades. This allows for analytics experts to extract important conclusions about the best way to manage resources and guide care. Leaders in healthcare increasingly rely on this kind of data which beats guesswork and hunches. Even past experience might not be as useful as analytic data since healthcare is constantly evolving.
Through the insightful use of data, analytics can generate fact-based decisions to guide healthcare planning, managing, research, and learning. For instance, by using analytics, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reduced hospital readmission rates and avoided $115 million in payment fraud.
Healthy Job Market
The good news is that the health informatics and health analytics job markets are thriving. The reason for this is due to high overall demand and also that several niches exist where analytics professionals can find work. For example, if you are more interested in disease management, you would work more closely with doctors. Or you might favor a focus on hospital management data and, therefore, work with administrators.
There’s also an intense interest in how the clinical and business aspects of medicine impact each other. Analytics is the perfect tool to unlock this insight. Even though a lot of valuable information is out there, it’s a huge challenge to organize and interpret it all. Due to the vast amount of data, and the nearly limitless number of connections, data scientists even implement artificial intelligence models to help guide decision making.
As a healthcare analytics professional, you can earn an average salary of $91.983, with top salaries reaching $156,000 or more.
Position for Success
Many college degrees can be a springboard to a future in health informatics/analytics. Business, computer science, data analyst, software engineering, system administration, network management, and network engineering are some of the more common degrees that can contribute towards a career in healthcare analytics.
An MBA is also extremely valuable to be able to pick and choose your future healthcare analytics career path (specialty, location, salary, etc.). To improve their resume even more, many people studying for a master's degree in health analytics will combine it with best MBA programs online. This allows for increased freedom and agility while you prepare for this demanding and highly rewarding career.