
A Career in Healthcare Consulting
Researching medical trends, implementing innovative applications, or creating medical educational material to help healthcare professionals, here is my experience on what a career in healthcare consulting is like.
Introduction
The healthcare sector has seen major restructuring and prioritisation changes from COVID-19 pandemic. With a strong push on digitalisation, patient safety and homecare.
Healthcare consulting focuses on providing expertise and solutions to healthcare-related clients; companies (pharma, biotech, etc.) and public bodies (hospitals, government, etc.). Some example activities are seen in the ‘Tackling projects’ section.
This is a passionate and challenging career from which you will see a direct impact of your work on the healthcare scene.
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)
- 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.
How to solve case studies? Here are some tips: https://hackingthecaseinterview.thinkific.com/pages/healthcare-consulting-case-interviews
My experience
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

Example deliverables
A lot of my work involves company strategy and is not available publicly, however here are some examples of publicly available deliverables:
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/
Written by Victor Lin Hu 林阳志