Key Responsibilities

The role is project focused and your day-to-day activities may vary substantially. Typical roles within healthcare consultants include:

• Project manager – status / schedules, organization, ensure client needs are met
  
• Medical Writer – Research literature, educational content, scientific writing, report.
  
• Analyst – online research, data analysis, creation of reporting systems
  
• Developers – develop applications, websites, monitoring systems, etc.
  
• Designers – educational content design, websites, videos, animations.

Degrees for healthcare consulting

• Life science or Healthcare related backgrounds – bring medical and therapy knowledge required for most projects
  
• Business or Economics backgrounds – strong in analysing consumer and business needs
  
• Other STEM (development) and designers – creation of asset deliverables

Tackling projects

You will find all kinds of projects and some categories and examples include:

• Scientific / market research – scientific results, health technology assessment, health care / therapy status, hospital work process, patient journey
  
• Marketing / educational content development – scientific evidence, novel solutions, disease information, health policy updates, animations
  
• Publications – scientific publications, media
  
• Events – webinars, symposia, congresses, advisory councils, etc.
  
• Development tools – budget impact tools, patient disease management applications, trending dashboard (recipes, tracking, etc.)

A common approach is:

Analyse needs -> Create action plan -> Develop solution -> Quality control -> Review

Tips for starting this career

• Be comfortable working with others
• Focus on specialising on what you’re good at
  
• Internships – Find opportunities to experience healthcare consulting. There are many different types of consultancies with different expertise or offering multiple services, for example:
  • Market research & strategic
  • Pharma/Med Tech research & development
  • Web/app development service
  • Marketing & medical education
  • Healthcare operations & logistics

Try some Consulting case studies!

• Case-study 1 – McKinsey example
  
• Case-study 2 – BCG example
  
• Case-study 3 – from Victor (open-ended, vascular access)
  • Background: Patients given intravenous medications are susceptible to vascular access-related complications, such as phlebitis, thrombosis, and infections, resulting in economic costs to patient and hospital health. A hospital aims to understand the estimated burden of vascular access-related complications, their causes, and the possible solutions they could implement.
    
  • Questions:
    • How would you investigate the economic health costs of vascular access complications in general and in the hospital?
    • What would your approach be in providing strategic recommendations for solutions and implementation?
      
  • Hints: literature, models, hospital research, evaluate the strengths / weaknesses / applicability of different solutions, implementation modelling)

How to solve case studies? Here are some tips: https://hackingthecaseinterview.thinkific.com/pages/healthcare-consulting-case-interviews

Background & Role

I joined Cogora as an Analyst in 2019, a healthcare media, market access and marketing consultancy.
My responsibilities included:

• Conducting market research on trends in therapeutic areas & markets
• Analysing data and communicate key results with strategic recommendations
• Managing projects & collaborating with teams to deliver
• Develop partnerships with clients, understanding their needs
• (Unique to me in this company) Implementation of innovative digital tools in adapting to COVID-19

Key skills I have acquired

• Project management: note taking, proposals, project strategy & organisation, resource management (time, personnel, budget)
  
• Healthcare landscape: European markets process of health technology implementation, healthcare market insights (Vascular Access, Anaesthesia, Oncology, Allergy)
  
• Data analysis: Excel VBA, Power BI, online tools (openprescribing.net), search queries
  
• Other software: project management (Smartsheets), Sharepoint, MS Teams and integration with applications, webapps, Mentimeter, Miro whiteboard

How did I find the role?

Very fun. Cogora being a small-medium sized enterprise and covering several aspects of healthcare consultancy has the following pros/cons:

Pros:
– Very fast career progression
– Early responsibilities
– Flexibility in how you approach work
– Many opportunities across different deliverables & to initiate your own assets

Cons:
– Lack of standardisation in protocols
– Lack of automation of processes
– Constrained resources & high pressure
– Lack of expertise in some areas

Publication of Cortés Rey, Noemí et al. “The state of vascular access teams: Results of a European survey.” International journal of clinical practice, e14849. 13 Sep. 2021, doi:10.1111/ijcp.14849

Video explaining results

GP payments model & analytics dashboards of https://pulse-intelligence.co.uk/