Written by: Corona Smith
Last Tuesday, Bruins for Business Health had the opportunity to speak with Mina Dang, MHS., a data scientist at OptumRX about her professional experiences, the field of data science, alongside any key skills that an aspiring data scientist should know, and much more! Keep reading to explore some key takeaways from this workshop.
Mina’s Background
Mina started out at UC Davis, where she graduated with a B.A. in Economics with a Data Analytics Specialization, as well as a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She continued on to get an MHS in Health Economics and Outcomes from Johns Hopkins’ School of Public Health, all in four years! She then started a position at Change Healthcare as a Data Scientist. Change Healthcare was recently acquired by UnitedHealth Group and she will start working at another one of their subsidiaries, Optum, very soon!
What Do Data Scientists like Mina Do?
As a Data Scientist at Change Healthcare, which processes over 75% of all healthcare claims in the US, transforms this raw data into insights and projective models that can predict health outcomes for people all over the country. This requires a lot of data cleaning. As healthcare claims that come in can be very messy, including spelling errors and missing information, Mina spends a long time making sure all the data is cleaned in order to gather insights. Mina also has to figure out how to take her large data sets, some of which have billions of rows, and turn them into smaller, more appropriate data sets that can give her useful information. But she doesn’t just work at her computer. Mina also has to present her key findings to stakeholders who can use this information to make informed decisions about care. Mina even says that 50% of her time is spent making and giving presentations through visualizations of data!
Other Common Applications of Data Science:
Strategy
Decision making
Personalized medicine
Health informatics
And more!
Skills for Data Scientists
Data Scientists use programming languages like Python, R, and Matlab, as well as visualization tools like Tableau, to clean data, gather insights, and create useful visualizations for presenting. Mina most often uses SQL for data cleaning and querying, which allows you to pool huge amounts of data together, making it a foundational tool for those studying Big Data.
Career Tips from Mina & BBH Board:
Your coursework is your foundation! Make sure you list skills learned in your classes on your Linkedin or resume so that potential employers will know the programs and tools that you are familiar with.
Create your own projects. You can easily find large data sets online (such as the BRFSS survey, which called patients and asked them about their healthcare status) and create your own predictive models. This will show employers what you know what to do with data.
Consider minoring in Bioinformatics and DS Engineering or getting a Specialization in Computing to have a foundational background in data science during undergrad.
You can earn certificates in Data Analytics from Google or even take Data Science courses online at Coursera, DataCamp, Codecademy, and more, and add these to your resume and/or LinkedIn. These can be used to gain new skills that can help you pivot into Data Science.
Getting a Masters’ can give you an extra edge when applying for jobs!
Possible Career Paths for Data Science in Healthcare:
Epidemiology and Community Health
Disease Tracking
Pharmaceutical Development
Medical Imaging
Vaccine Management
And many more!
We hope that this workshop was insightful and would love to say thank you to Mina for speaking to BBH! You can find more information via our slideshow here. We look forward to seeing you all at future events and workshops!
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