A very common New Years resolution is to get traction on accelerating your career. Over the next couple of months, I will be highlighting resources and strategies that can help you reach that “next level” (and beyond) in your analytics career. Feel free to share with me any ideas that I might have missed, and I’ll gladly add them to this series of articles.
It is often the case that analytics professionals are scattered throughout a Health Care Organization (HCO). Some might be located within the IT group, others are likely embedded in various business units (such as departments and programs) throughout the HCO. While many HCOs at the forefront of analytics have established analytics Centers of Excellence, it can be challenging to find a “home base” to connect with and learn from individuals with a common interest in analytics.
One of the best websites that I have found for analytics professionals is INFORMS (http://www.informs.org), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. For those of you not familiar with the term, Operations Research (as defined by INFORMS) is,
“the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions”
INFORMS exists to help analytics professionals develop the skill-set to implement analytics applications in real-word operational and process improvement situations. There are many communities and interest groups (including one dedicated to healthcare applications), as well as educational opportunities and industry-related conferences. INFORMS offers a free subscription to their Analytics digital magazine which is an excellent read, and has covered healthcare-related analytics topics in the past.
In fact, there is the first INFORMS-sponsored conference coming up in June 2011 that focuses on advances in Operations Research and Analytics in Healthcare. You can find more information about this exciting event for healthcare analytics professionals on the INFORMS Healthcare 2011 conference website (http://meetings2.informs.org/healthcare2011/).
As a healthcare analytics practitioner (and member of INFORMS), I would recommend that you at least check out this organization; I am sure you will find something there to help kick-start your healthcare analytics career in 2011!
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