After spending the last 36 hours thinking and realizing that I may not even be a competitive candidate for a generalized healthcare administrative role despite having worked over three years in a general surgery clinic in a naval hospital. It will be quick to assume that my skills for healthcare work have atrophied due to it being over 13 years ago.
It’s time to take drastic measures. Will my project that I am about to embark on be overkill for a general administrative healthcare role? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it’s a move I must make to end over 8 years of underemployment.
What is this project I’m going to embark on?
Simulating a Healthcare Operations Analyst.
Design a database from scratch that would simulate how the data would be stored in a clinical hospital database.
Use AI to generate synthetic data that would be able to simulate real world healthcare data that would enable me to find trends and make recommendations. The data would also be dirty to demonstrate data cleaning skills.
Use SQL to clean and find insights and trends.
Create a report on the findings and make suggestions.
May even step it up by involving some automation though this depends on how long this project takes me.
Example problems I would look at:
How does surgical start time accuracy impact patient discharge time and length of stay.
Is there a correlation between surgical duration variability and patient readmission rates for specific procedures?
Can potential scheduling bottlenecks be predicted based on historical data?
What is our utilization rate for the operating room/s.
Many look at portfolio projects as a foothold to gain entrance into the analytical field, in this case I’m looking at a portfolio to land me any role that pays enough for me to start paying off my student loan debt.
This is exciting - keep us posted on your progress.
What are you using to host the project? Github? something else?
Github would be good because you can do all of your documentation in MD files which format nicely and can act as a landing page. You can always make it look pretty on a portfolio site later too, but it’s nice to stay organized and keep your code, etc all in one place.
Just curious about the stack/approach you’re using, that stuff always is interesting to me.
I will hosting the project on GitHub. I will have a very brief synopsis on my portfolio, but there will be easy to find links to the GitHub for the methodology, coding, schemas, and database design.
The goal of this project is to demonstrate that I’m up to date on technical skills, helps me to refreshen on medical terminology, and shows my desire to get into healthcare. It’s going to be how I try and fill in the experience gap without without having to spend money on a certification program as with my current budget is not doable.
I figure a good quality project that takes around 6 to 8 weeks or 100+ hours will hopefully suffice to at least be attractive enough to interview for entry-level healthcare admin roles. For analytical roles, I figure it would take 2-4 projects. The goal for now is just get my foot in the door. I have three or four months remaining at my current holiday seasonal job at Target so might as well get this project done before I’m back on the unemployment line.
Luckily, the management is all different at the Target I work at. I worked there six years ago and it was hell. I actually was terminated because I could not work fast enough. Working the morning shift felt like I was training for Olympic Bobsledding! That is how fast they wanted us to work, 80-90 boxes of merchandised stocked per hour. The top speeds of bobsleds = 80-90+ mph!!
Aside from first hand witnessing why retail has such a high turn-over rate and having been working hours from 4 am in the morning to past noon has me really focusing on choosing a medical coding program that will be robust and help give me the best leverage. Luckily, it hasn’t been as bad as it was six years ago, but definitely more chaotic during the holiday season.
I’ve narrowed it down to two options. The AAPC CPC Job Ready Program that will take 46 weeks to finish with the last 17 weeks being an unpaid internship to gain actual job experience versus going through the Andrews School of Medical Billing and Coding that is highly regarded as the Harvard of Coding schoolings which would take me anywhere from 9 months to 18 months to complete depending on how well the stuff I learned during my time in the military and master’s degree program comes back.
When using Google AI to take into account my job history and employment gaps, it leans heavily towards Andrews. Now, I’m awaiting for a response from a couple of posts I made on a couple of Facebook medical billing and coding forums to see which program would give me better leverage in the job market given my career setbacks and age.
Right now, I’m leaning towards Andrews and would start in March after I’ve worked a few weeks at my seasonal tax role, which pays almost double what I’m making now as a seasonal retail worker and will probably be much easier work. No surprise there given my stress levels and perceived level of work is much higher at these low wage jobs then it has been when ever I work roles paying substantially more.
I wish you luck @Donnelly_Miller. I know you have been working really hard to build up your analytics skills and it’s a tough job market right now. This will no doubt be its own journey with its own challenges, but it sounds like with your past experience it would potentially be a good path for you.
That is how fast they wanted us to work, 80-90 boxes of merchandised stocked per hour. The top speeds of bobsleds = 80-90+ mph!!