Health care consulting is a field in which a team of consultants provides advice to businesses, government entities and nonprofit organizations. Consultants help organizations with an array of problems, such as defining challenges or opportunities, collecting and analyzing data to understand problems, presenting solutions and implementing changes across an organization.
Premedical students can pursue consulting projects through consulting clubs at their colleges, summer internships and full-time jobs during gap years before entering medical school.
The Value of Consulting to Medical Careers
Premeds can gain many valuable skills and insights through health care consulting projects.
First, projects expose consultants to the complex health care ecosystem and can provide a broad overview of stakeholders, including hospitals, insurance companies, governments, patients, doctors, pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies. Projects can also focus on a deep dive into one segment of the health care system and involve gathering data from hospital leaders, physicians and patients.
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Second, consultants can apply skills learned in the classroom to problem-solving on consulting projects. For example, they may use statistics and data analytics to analyze large data sets.
Third, premeds can gain professional experience in consulting. They have to respond to emails promptly and professionally with internal colleagues and external clients, for example. Consultants commonly present their data analysis and solutions to clients through PowerPoint presentations, which require clear written, visual and oral communication skills.
The range of health care consulting projects is broad. Here are examples of consulting projects across health care to give an idea of the types of problems consultants may tackle.
Hospital Administration
Many hospitals need to optimize their bed utilization and improve patient wait times. Additionally, hospitals want to improve patient satisfaction and outcomes.
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Here’s an example consulting case: The hospital wants to decrease the number of patient re-admissions to the hospital. Analyze the hospital data to understand whether there are certain cohorts of patients or patient diagnoses that have higher re-admission rates. What are interventions or policies the hospital can create to decrease re-admission rates?
Biotech and Pharma
Biotech and pharmaceutical companies want to continuously strengthen their drug pipelines and increase sales of their existing drugs.
Example consulting case: A pharmaceutical company developed a new skin cancer drug and wants to launch the drug in the U.S. Clinical trials showed that the drug has a better five-year survival rate among patients. The company hopes that this will be the new standard of care and comes to your team with the following questions: What price should it sell the new drug? What is the best marketing strategy so dermatologists and oncologists prescribe the drug?
Government
Both national and local governments can work with consulting teams to improve citizens’ health. Governments want to analyze the effects of policies and make changes to health care infrastructure.
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Example consulting case: A country in Asia has seen its childhood vaccination rates decline over the past three years. The nation’s ministry of health comes to your team for help identifying why there is a decline in childhood vaccinations. often have opportunities to analyze data and interact with a variety of health care leaders. Premeds can take these experiences with them as future physician leaders in hospitals and as community leaders.
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How Consulting Experience Can Help Premed Students originally appeared on usnews.com
