Healthcare needs people with data and maths skills! Here are some things you could do with a data career in health
Healthcare is a growing sector, and with an ageing population, careers in the field are projected to get ever more important. There will always be a need for people who work in health!
Data is becoming an increasingly valuable part of the health picture. Whether it’s diagnosing individual people or monitoring the health of entire countries, data science has a role to play. Plus, in fields like bioinformatics, diseases can be identified and treatments can be developed.
But a lot of this data is private and needs to be handled responsibly. And since it deals directly with humans, it can be very noisy and complicated!
If you’re interested in the healthcare sector, here are a few spots that data science might be your way in.
Diagnosis data
Sometimes, even diagnosing a disease can be difficult. But data from past patients can make it easier to spot future patients.
One technique making waves in this field is image analysis. Photographs of skin cancers can be used to train software, which can then pick out suspicious moles on new patients. The Skin Health Institute is running a clinical trial of this technology.
Then there’s endometriosis, a condition that forms in people’s uteruses and can be extremely painful. Often, the only way to diagnose endometriosis is with keyhole surgery. But a team of researchers in Adelaide has been working on a non-invasive technique called IMAGENDO that can be used to diagnose endometriosis with MRI and ultrasound scans instead.
People, decoded
How do we know that just under half of Australians have experienced a mental health disorder, or that cancer survival rates have improved by about 20% in the last 30 years? How can we tell if a flu outbreak is concerning, or if a new exercise initiative is working?
Data is crucial for understanding how to make communities healthier, but it comes from hundreds of different sources. Data scientists are needed to make sense of it! The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare plays a big role in this, collecting and maintaining data on the nation’s health. Meanwhile, the new Australian Centre for Disease Control is collating health data to monitor diseases – and spot any new health emergencies in their early stages.
Step it up
Ever worn a step tracker or a smart watch that monitors your sleep? Wearable health tech is becoming a powerful way to keep tabs on your own health.
For athletes, wearable health monitors can track their performance and recovery, analyse movement patterns, and identify weaknesses. Data scientists make sense of the information these monitors produce, without breaching confidentiality
Virus tracker
Want to watch virus data in action? Nextstrain.org tracks the evolution of diseases of interest as they happen!
Start your career here – work in health
Data Science + Health + Study
- Bachelor of Data Science, QUT
- Master of Science in Health Data Science, UNSW Sydney
- Master of Health Data Analytics, Monash University
- Master of Digital Health and Data Science, The University of Sydney
Data Science + Health + Jobs
- Healthcare consultant, $61K–$121K
- Data scientist, $69K–$148K
- Bioinformatician, $50K–$92K
- Biostatistician, $77K–$118K
This article was first published in Careers with STEM: Data Science, and was produced in partnership with QUT.
