I recently received an insightful question from a listener of the Health Analytic Insight Podcast who asked me: “What do I think will be potential future careers in Health Informatics?”
Although no one can predict the future, in my opinion, as standards such as FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) improve connectivity between healthcare systems, we will be able to transform data from multiple sources for improved health outcomes. Therefore, I think the three jobs which feed into this are the medical data scientist, clinical data engineer and the UX healthcare designer. 
Medical Data Scientist
A medical data scientist can work at a healthcare startup and usually has both a clinical and technical background. A medical data scientist works with large amounts of health data and uses tools such as R or Python to manipulate unstructured data into insights. This can be done by developing predictive algorithms, such as predicting the re-admission rates of patients based on socioeconomic factors, the type of condition they were admitted for and age to name a few variables.
There is also a lot of work being done with Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is a subset of machine learning where an algorithm can analyze trends in language to make predictions. NLP can be used to reduce the administrative load in clinics and hospitals so hospital staff can focus on patient care. For instance, the use of medical chatbots to answer FAQs when patients call-in to clinics. In addition, NLP can be used to uncover gaps in data quality when there are health records which might be missing key information to be able to link records, instead of having a person spend hours manually searching through countless records, using an algorithm is a time-saving solution.
A medical data scientist will require a quantitative degree with a strong understanding of Statistics or Biostatistics (e.g. knowledge of logistic regression and ANOVA) and have experience with R or Python and Apache Spark. A medical scientist might work on projects such as developing predictive models to forecast healthcare metrics, such as patient length of stay, patient satisfaction and readmission rates by hospital department. A medical data scientist will also have to understand clinical terminology and be passionate about advancing healthcare, as there will often be roadblocks (e.g. ensuring patient’s data is secure and safe) when it comes to applying machine learning to healthcare data.
What are similar job titles? Jobs with similar job descriptions to a medical data scientists include: an epidemiologist, methodologist, clinical informatics specialist and a healthcare data analyst
Where do I start? Consider searching “medical startups” in your area to find available positions. If you don’t have experience in R or Python you can find some great tutorials on Youtube, Udemy, Codeacademy and Coursera. Consider creating a clinical business intelligence portfolio to practice your skills in R or Python by designing a practical solution to a healthcare problem. This blog post details how to build your own clinical business intelligence portfolio here.
Data Engineers
You can’t have medical data scientists without data engineers to build the architecture necessary to house large databases which the medical data scientists use to produce these insights. This includes building data pipelines to take the raw, unstructured data from labs, EMR/EHR, manual entry and many other clinical sources and transforming this messy data into a structured form, such as a data warehouse. It’s important when building a data warehouse for a hospital or clinical organization that the data engineer has an understanding of the clinical rules of the organization (e.g. health card numbers should have a certain number of characters). This is especially true if some of the data will be manually entered in, it’s important for certain checks and balances to be built into the system so that the data is of high integrity and can be used for reporting by the business intelligence team.
HIMSS surveyed 204 respondents in June 2019 who work for hospitals and it was estimated that 79% of respondents stated “the cloud is a strategic priority for their organization in the coming year”. As more and more healthcare organizations move to the cloud, data engineers will need to have experience both with applications which are on-premise and in a cloud platform such as Azure or AWS.
What are similar job titles? Jobs with similar job descriptions to a data engineer include: Hadoop developer, solutions architect engineer, ETL developer and a data warehouse engineer
Where do I start? People in this field usually have a quantitative background in computer science, IT or a software engineering degree. Valuable skills include knowledge of SQL or NoSQL languages, Python, Apache Spark. There are also several certifications in this field including the Google Certification and IBM Certification 
Photo by Procreator UX Design Studio on Unsplash
UX Healthcare Designer
UX design is a rapidly growing field, especially in healthcare. You can hear my interview with Dr. Roxana-Maria Barbu who works as a Cognitive Scientist and UX researcher at a healthcare software company here. UX Design in healthcare is critical as the number of mHealth apps and dashboards for reporting become common place in healthcare organizations. Even when we think back to 2020 and the number of graphs we used to keep track of the daily infection rates. Building reports and dashboards is key to keeping track of healthcare metrics and verifying the organization is meeting their defined benchmarks to improve health outcomes.
Therefore a role such as a UX researcher and designer is important as we need that individual who is trained to have the end user in mind when building tech tools and platforms throughout the planning, designing and deployment stages. You can read my tips on how to integrate end users when designing reports and dashboards in this blog post here. UX designers ensure that the final product has value for its end user by reducing the barriers to using the tool. For instance, a simple example is ensuring the colour palette of the product is colour-blind friendly or ensuring the charts and graphs are understandable by clinicians so they can do their job effectively.
What are similar job titles? Jobs with similar job descriptions to a UX healthcare designer include: product designer, visual designer, data visualization specialist and a UX researcher.
Where do I start? You can start by learning basic CSS, HTML, Javascript, Power BI or Tableau and project management skills to be able to organize meetings and manage deadlines from multiple departments.
This is an overview of three careers which I think will be in-demand in the future of health informatics. Comment down below, which jobs do you think will be impactful for the future of healthcare?
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