Career-Calling

Digital Health Strategist

• Pratibha Pandit • Season 1

Share episode

Hear from Shikha Avancha,  about the opportunities in Digital Health and how she is building a career at the intersection of Healthcare, technology and business.


March of 2021, Time Magazine published 29 statistics on how COVID-19 had impacted our lives. Declining divorce rates, America's sudden passion for baking, inordinate amounts of time spent streaming, skyrocketing pajama sales. Tucked among them was one other data point. A promising development wished for by many. 7% of all health insurance claims for telehealth. That is, consulting your physician via video call,as opposed to a meager point 0.16%, two years prior. This is further encouraging, considering a report from Harvard Business Review just five years prior, that had listed healthcare industry, almost at the bottom, number sixth place for being digitally advanced. That is, converting information into computer readable format and utilizing technologies in their mode of operation. COVID 19 may have finally accelerated the process of digitization in healthcare. And with change comes new opportunities. Today we will explore the emerging digital health industry. And the opportunities it presents for interdisciplinary expertise. This is Career-Calling. And I'm your host Pratibha Pandit. My guest today is Shikha Avancha. Who has combined her passion for health care, expertise in technology and business into a dream career in digital health strategy and innovation. Shikha has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science with minors in Biochemistry, and Business from Rice University. She worked in Bain and Company as a Management Consultant and as Manager of Health Tech strategy and operations at Johnson and Johnson. And now pursuing a graduate degree in Clinical Informatics Management in Stanford School Of Medicine, with the intention of furthering her career in Digital Health Strategy and Innovation.

Pratibha Pandit:

Shika, welcome to Career-Calling. Thank you so much for your time.

Shikha Avancha:

Yep. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to, to be here and to chat about sort of my background and the field more broadly.

Pratibha Pandit:

I believe the next era of the workforce is going to be an era of interdisciplinary experts like yourself. First off, tell our audience what is digital health and what is clinical informatics.

Shikha Avancha:

So digital health is sort of the broad category term to think about the inclusion of technology within healthcare. And so if you look at some other industries like obviously big tech, automotive industry, et cetera, they're sort of keeping up to par with the innovation in the tech industry broadly speaking. Healthcare is probably two decades at least, behind that situation. We're, we're still on pager, we're still on fax in a lot of cases, and, and we're still sort of trying to bring a lot of that big tech innovation that happens sort of in the.com bubble and, and make it more widely integrated into healthcare. In addition to sort of pushing the envelope on new forms of technology or care intervention or care diagnostics that are truly gonna change the way that we make patient care. And so digital health sort of encompasses all of that study. Clinical informatics in particular is the study of data within the healthcare context. And so this can include patient data that is available in the EHR. So like, you know, when you go to the doctor, they take your height, your weight, your blood pressure, all of those elements. Any sort of diagnostic or lab tests you've had, as well as now sort of this new category of data around wearables, like your Fitbit, your step counter, your sleep habits all of those sort of other ways in which you interact with technology that inform the way that you are experiencing your healthcare. And so Clinical Informatics really takes all of those different data sources and puts them together in a way that we can answer clinically relevant questions around what is the best way to treat a patient? Or how do we detect the presence or absence of a certain illness or things like that is feeds into clinical informatics.

Pratibha Pandit:

Now, as you mentioned, the field of medicine has always had medical devices, right? What is the emergence of digital health. Like is there, is there a history behind it? Why this new you know field is becoming more prominent today?

Shikha Avancha:

I think you're seeing, I mean, if you think about the macro climate as a whole, you're seeing a lot venture capital money coming from Silicon Valley, which is obviously, as we both know, very focused on the tech sector. And you're seeing also a lot of focus on the healthcare industry, especially in the last couple years with the Covid pandemic. And so I think those two things are really coming together to sort of bring technology and bring healthcare forward using technology. Then the advent of, you know, things like the Apple Watch and other forms of data tracking with your phone, which is always practically with you, with your, your Apple watches or other sort of devices. Also integrating into that, that care journey and sort of hoping that we're able to leverage some of that data from that, those different streams of technology to inform a patient's care.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. So who are the players? Like the, much of these devices are now in the hands of the consumer, like the medical devices were in, the clinicians hands today, the patients have their own devices and, you know, data is getting generated in so many different endpoints, so to speak. So who are the players other than the patients who are generating these data? Who are the other players that will define digital health?

Shikha Avancha:

So, as you mentioned, obviously manufacturers, both of medical devices, which I think are sort of these data generating pieces of, in con in conjunction with consumers. Also sort of the typical players that you see in the healthcare industry that you've been familiar with. So, Providers and health systems physicians who are able to treat their patients and, and other healthcare professionals, the health systems for which they work, for your insurance providers, your payers, whether that's commercial like, you know, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, et cetera, or government funded Medicare, Medicaid provider. And then as well, pharma companies are actually making a movement towards digital health through better patient engagement tools through investments in areas like digital therapeutics or areas where they are kind of combining the idea of presenting technology and presenting drug development. And then there's a whole slew of sort of new and emerging startups in this space that are kind of capitalizing on, again, like mentioned before, that venture capital money or other sorts of funding sources to really drive further innovation in areas that we might not have thought about or intersections of these areas that we that are, have historically not been seen in the past. Those are your major players. And then you also start have started to see things like Walmart for example, that's opening up clinics in their physical store locations. And that's a newer concept that, you know, we haven't been thinking about of like going to the grocery store and being able to get, you know, a little, a consult with your primary care physician while you're, you know, shopping for eggs or whatever. So there's a few kind of existing large players that are also expanding into healthcare space because of the growth in the industry as a whole.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Now, your plan is to become a digital health strategist that kind of aligns with your management consulting background. Help us understand what, What is the role of a digital strategist?

Shikha Avancha:

So digital health is like, so just even thinking about all the players we just mentioned. It's a very complicated landscape with a lot of different connections between these players. A lot of different ways in which information flows and monetary incentives flow between these players. And so the digital health strategy role is, it can sit within any one of these organizations, but the real goal is to think about how does this organization, whether it's a health system, a payer, a startup, Think about how they interact with inform partnerships and relationships with the other players in this ecosystem such that they're able to get adoption for their solutions with patients, with providers, get paid for their solutions from insurance companies, get access to a broader slew of the market by potentially partnering with larger players in the, in the area. And so, strategy is thinking about all of those different elements as well as what is our competition doing? Who might be coming up in this space that we should be worried about or, or think about potentially partnering with in order to be successful.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. So how you already had a healthcare background in your management consulting and you worked in a healthcare company. How does clinical informatics management as a grad program help you in that? What kind of skill sets? When I hear the term clinical informatics management, I viewed it more, it sounds more like a technical you know degree to me. So help, help me understand how your education is helping you in this direction.

Shikha Avancha:

Yeah, I mean, I would characterize the program that I'm in right now, it's, it's with Stanford. It's called Clinical Informatics Management. It is a one year graduate degree, 12 months summer to summer. But it's really more focused like a management degree, where you're thinking about how do I support the digital health and the health tech ecosystem moving forward in any one of these capacities. And so for me so the class curriculum is partly business school courses, partly medical and healthcare landscaping type courses and then there's a couple informatics courses that are more technical in nature, but more so thinking about how do you work with individuals who are truly the experts and, and the developers and the product people in these areas and the informaticists in these areas in order to kind of pull those insights and then kind of think about how, what the next direction is that you're going to take within for your company, within the healthcare ecosystem. The blending of the degree is perfect because it lets me kind of leverage my business background, get more in depth on the players in the healthcare industry that I haven't had the chance to work with. So, for example, my background, I've never worked with providers or health systems, and so now I know more about how those individuals are thinking about their incentives and, and how they choose to interact with the rest of the healthcare system as well as get kinda a basic comfortability and, and familiarity with how the Informaticists think about their line of work and how can I leverage those insights to inform the things that I wanna do in my role.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Now, if some students who may have computer science background but interested in healthcare and they don't, may not want to go into the management side of things, but more to the, you know, want to be technologists. Is this path suitable or is this primarily more management, business focus?

Shikha Avancha:

No, I'm taking a management business focus, spin on it, because that's what I'm passionate about. But you could take, you know, there's individuals in our program who are clinicians and, and want to continue practicing after graduation, but they want kind of the broader scope of understanding of how does the business of healthcare work, or how does the technology elements work so that they can integrate that into the way that they provide care. There's individuals who are technologists who are developers or product folks who, again, Want to stay in that arena, but want sort of the broader context of how their work fits into to other functions. And so there's different ways that you can sort of take this kind of a degree or, or work in this field that doesn't necessarily involve being a business or a management type expert. That's just where my background is and where my interests lie. But there's totally a path where, you know, you work with healthcare. Which is a very messy place to work with given, you know, again, not all of it is digitized, not all of it is consistent and, and try to pull out clinical insights from that in a way that informs the way that that providers are, are providing patient care or that startups are influencing their journeys or whatever it is. However you choose to impact the, the system with that. But there is, there's totally a role that is, is very much more data focused. There's also roles that are more, you know, being a developer for a healthcare product, being a product person for a healthcare product. Like those are, those are still roles that exist. It's just not where I've chosen to focus.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. You also kind of touched upon it how the healthcare has been slower to adopt the newer technologies. Anytime there is a talk of intersections where, you know, the technology experts they wanna go into this field. One of the concerns is always about, well, that's a very different industry that operates very differently. It's, it may not have the same cultures and the, you know, the atmosphere, the vibe. This is an emerging field and a lot of these intersection studies are coming up, which I think is very promising. How do you describe the, the industry vibe right now? Like is, is there a clear emergence of an industry or it is still kind of, you know, greenfield that, that it needs to take its shape?

Shikha Avancha:

Definitely an emerged industry and a growing one and thought both in terms of the, the number of startup players that are that are expanding into the space, as well as just the focus of existing healthcare players and non-healthcare players that are, are pushing a foray into healthcare through, just specifically through digital channels. And so then the second piece of that is sort of the, the general culture and vibe, I think if you want to work in healthcare, one of the things that you almost naturally have to put first is, is the patient and, and the patient experience and how they are navigating their care. And so there's sort of this, this culture and this vibe throughout the industry of wanting to help people in whatever capacity that might take. Whether that's, again, as a, as a clinician as. Strategist as a developer, whatever it is. And so I think because of that, and because more and more people have been affected by healthcare in the last couple years with, with the Covid pandemic, there's more of that passion and that that drive to say, I really wanna work on solving this particular healthcare problem because I had, you know, X, y, Z experience in my family. Or I saw this happen to a friend, and therefore, you know, I, I'm really passionate about solving this problem for other people who might be in a similar healthcare situation. I think it leads to a lot of just like energy, positive energy

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm.

Shikha Avancha:

something that

Pratibha Pandit:

Yeah.

Shikha Avancha:

is truly impactful for other people.

Pratibha Pandit:

Yeah. And I do think that the programs like this that are at the intersection will accelerate that. Related to that question is, you know, there are many technologists, maybe data scientists and, you know, even from the general purpose management background, who may not want to go back to school, but they may want to go into this field. How important do you think having a medical or a clinical type of background? I mean, you know, going through the path that you are taking versus directly and trying to enter this, what advantage it is giving you by going into this program?

Shikha Avancha:

Yeah. Well, so I will say that a lot of people in our program because of the way it's structured, it's sort of every other weekend, Friday and Saturday all day. So a lot of people are working full-time through the program. So for individuals who are interested in this kind of intersection but don't wanna leave their full-time job, I was in that situation when I started the program, it is, it does give you that flexibility to sort of be able to take classes on a, on a compressed schedule such that you can remain in a full-time work situation. But that, if going back to school at all is not of interest, I think the benefit of doing a program like this is getting that exposure to all of the different parts of the healthcare ecosystem and all of the different types of players and how they might think about the same problem differently. It's really helpful to be able to be in a room with clinicians and suggest an idea and have them say, that's not gonna work. Like no patient is ever going to adopt that. Like, that's immensely helpful feedback that I probably, you know, being in a room by myself would not have gotten for months and probably would've run down the wrong direction for a while. I think it's helpful for, for kind of having that baseline knowledge across areas that you might not have had personal experience in, as well as having the that network. But in order to kind of replace that, I think there's a few different sort of healthcare related and health tech related Slack communities that are out there that kind of give you a good pulse on where the industry is headed, what the key challenges are, how other people from different backgrounds are thinking about problems that as well as just resources that are helpful for getting a pulse on the healthcare landscape and, how different players are, are incentivized differently or think differently about the same types of problems. So there's ways to around it and, and kind of get the crowdsource that, that level of education for me it was just preferential to, to have it sort of collated for myself into this graduate degree.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Now coming to specifically to your path, you have a computer science background and you went into management consulting and then you are now studying you know, informatics management. Did you always envision a career in this type of intersection, interdisciplinary field? how did you, how did you, approach your, your career so far?

Shikha Avancha:

A long, very windy path is the short story of it. But yes, always envisioned a career in this intersection. Actually started off thinking, I always knew I was passionate about healthcare and that came from sort of, High school courses and biology were my most favorite that I was doing. I, I liked the idea of working on a problem that would just be really impactful for, for a particular individual and, and sort of supercharge their impact on the world later on. Like, I kind of liken it in my head to, to ripples of like sort of, you know, when you drop a pebble in a pond, then you get the kind of the ripple effect forward. Like, that's how I think about healthcare is you can change the trajectory for one person. That person can kinda go on to make their impact on the world as a result. For me, that's, that was the draw into healthcare in particular. I started my undergraduate degree studying biochemistry. Thought I wanted to get a PhD for a while, thought I wanted to be a doctor for a while. And basically realized that I wanted to have a larger impact on more people than I could have had through having a clinical practice or through working on one specific research problem. And I also realize that I'm someone who enjoys task switching and working on different, complicated problems a lot, and then switching that up. And so with both of those things, I didn't think that a traditional sort of career in the hard sciences was the right path for me. I started at that point looking at the healthcare industry, seeing, trying to pick up trends, trying to see where it was headed, and sort of saw this wave towards digital health. And so that's what led me to pivot and major in computer science was the goal of just being able to speak that language. And sort of act as a bridge between people who are gonna be a lot more skilled than I am in the biology field, and people who are gonna be a lot more skilled than I'm in the technology field and just sit in middle and be able to sort of be that, that bridge and that liaison. I then realized that like to be successful in the digital health industry as not a clinician or not as a technologist, there was sort of this third field that emerged around, like creating that structure around those interactions and, and pushing the business forward. So that's what got me interested in the management side of the house. And consulting was just, Sort of the best place to build those fundamental skills to really understand how to, to build a business and grow a business and, and answer a lot of strategic questions in a data-driven way. And so I wanted to start my career there to kind of get that fundamental toolkit worked partly in healthcare and partly outside of healthcare. But once I felt like I had kind of. Gotten that, that basic set of business skills, I wanted to sort of apply it in, in the context that I was actually passionate about. So that's when I made my transition to J&J into health tech strategy to kind of marry those different components together and really work on that intersection of being a liaison between the business process individuals, the technology experts, the clinicians and providers in the space and all in the service of creating great patient, facing products. Chose to pursue graduate school after that with the goal of sort of looking at different innovation landscapes specific to digital health. So because I had worked at Bain and J&J very large companies in the past, I sort of wanted, was curious about the experience of what does innovation look like when there is many, many fewer people on a team, like in a startup. And, and is that a place that might be interesting for myself and so that's what I've been trying to explore over the last year is thinking about different ways in which I could continue to impact the digital health world, but, potentially in a smaller environment, or at least if that's something that's, that might of interest from working style perspective.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Now a lot of you know, people understand management consulting as a path that exists, but there is not, early on at least there is not a lot of clarity on how we go about it or how, how does this work? I've heard a lot of people ask, like, a lot of people are management consultants in my circle, but I don't know what they do So can you, can you throw a little bit of light on two things? Why did you pick management consulting after undergrad specifically because, you know, you could also get a business exposure by working at a healthcare company or something like that. Why did you get into that path? And two, you did, healthcare consulting even in your management consulting practice, your focus was healthcare from what I could tell. Correct. How do you, approach that? Like how do you make sure that in a field that is more generic, like management consulting, how did you ensure that you go into the, the healthcare practice there?

Shikha Avancha:

I did have experience on healthcare projects, but I wouldn't call myself specialized in healthcare consulting practice when, when I was at Bain. Mostly because the firm doesn't really do specialization until much later in your career. But I did request like one of my first you can kind of have staffing preferences on the types of cases that you want to be on and some people sort of request certain industries or types of work like mergers and acquisitions or implementation projects or things like that or they request specific people to work with that they've worked with in the past and enjoy that relationship with. And so for me, it was always my number one priority, put me on a healthcare case. I don't care what it is, I don't care who it's with. Like I want that experience and so whenever it comes available, I wanna be on the, on the top of that list. So that's how I would suggest on kind of like if you are going into a more generalist role, how you can find your specific niches. And you might not always get it. I didn't get any healthcare cases in my first year at the firm, which was just kind of luck of the draw on that one. But just continuing to voice that preference and chatting with people who are in the practice partners who are in the healthcare practice or other friends that might be staffed on healthcare cases, just to get a sense of how the work might be similar or different. I think was, was helpful for me in that sense. And then going back a step and choosing management consulting as a place to start that business fundamental toolkit. It was just sort of the place that would allow me to see the most number of diverse things in the shortest amount of time.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm.

Shikha Avancha:

I didn't know, I felt like all of the other roles that I was looking at at a healthcare company for example, were, you know, go be a product person or go be a marketer, or go be a salesperson. Like you had kinda have to pick one thing and I didn't know anything to be able to, to say with any certainty that I, you know, I wanted to be a marketer, I wanted to be a sales individual or whatever and so, management consulting, I think was a good first step to be able to say what even is out there in the business world and which of these things are things that I enjoy and which of these things are things that I don't enjoy? And so that I think also helped me shape towards things that were more strategic in nature, things that kind of operated in a much higher level in my head and sort of impacted multiple functions within the company were that

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm.

Shikha Avancha:

that stood out to me and, and ended up being the most interesting projects that I was.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. So you, you seemed like you had a very clear idea that this is what you wanted to do early on. Right? At least from the undergrad level, you had a very clear idea. Do you think, for the students who are still figuring it out, until they're really find out their niche that they're interested in, do you recommend them going into these very specific specialized grad programs?

Shikha Avancha:

I sort of saw my undergrad experience as like the place where I kept it as broad as possible and I didn't want to do anything that was, that felt almost too specialized or too narrow. And then, Once I had kind of had some work experience, exactly to your point, had some work experience, saw a few different fields, and knew what my area was, then I thought I found it a lot easier to say these specific types of graduate programs are the ones that are going to fit my need the best.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. I was also looking

Shikha Avancha:

at business school for a while, and which is obviously a much more broad generalist management program. And after finding this program for me it was just, I knew I was gonna stay in healthcare and there was no real point for me to spend a lot of time like learning about, you know, Marketing or Operations in context outside of this one area that I wanted to work in. And then, so it, I think there's benefit if there's, if you're still kind of, you want a time to explore, you want time to, to see other industries out there, you are interested in kind of keeping, you know, working potentially in more of a functional role. Like you wanna be a marketer and it doesn't really matter to you, whether it's in healthcare or in airlines or in, you know, hotels then, you know, a broader generalist management degree probably was a better fit for you. But if you know, I'm not gonna leave the healthcare industry for myself at least for a very long time. Then my energy is more, it's better well spent in my head focusing on content that is purely tailored to that industry, and kind of works across a variety of different

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm..Mm-hmm. makes sense. Now, you talked about how you kind of started with biochemistry and then streamlined yourself towards this, what were some of the resources that were helpful for you? Like to do your research, you know, find that clarity of thought.

Shikha Avancha:

I tried a lot of things and I realized that I didn't enjoy a lot of things, so I closed a lot of doors that way. And then I had a lot of conversations with people that, to kind of understand what their fields looked like and sort of in informational interview type situations where I was able to say, okay, this, these aspects of the job that you're describing are interesting to me. These aspects are not, overall, I don't think I'm excited about this, so let's not go down that path. So for example, when I started at Rice, I started working in a lab a neuroscience lab just because I thought I wanted to get a PhD and I thought research was gonna be really interesting to me. And I started doing it and I thought, this is great, I am enjoying this, and then three months down the line, I was like, you know what? I don't think I can do this for the rest of my life. Like this is, this is good for a short amount of time. And then I don't have the patience to, to sit on a research project and, and kind of focus in that way for the length of a PhD. So that was a door I closed. I worked that summer in marketing with a pharmaceutical company and just worked with really large complex data sets to inform different types of analyses. Talked with sales reps in different territories to understand what was kind of what tactics they were using that were helping them do really well and, and how, what was sort of setting the, the high performance territories apart from others and, and. Just trying to understand and really get deep with the data and deep with individuals. And I loved that type of work where I felt like I was, you know, putting in a lot of, I was able to do a lot of strong analytics work to inform a recommendation that would change the way that the company thought about how they were marketing their products or how they were supporting their salespeople across different territories. and so that like type of work sort of started steering me towards, okay, maybe like business in a broad sense or something where it's data driven decision making is something that I'm excited about. For medicine, I shadowed a clinician. I thought I was, I was really passionate about neuroscience, so I thought I was gonna get a PhD in that, or I was gonna go be a neurologist as a career. And that was just purely because, I thought the brain was really complicated and I thought it would be a fun place to explore. So he shattered a neurologist for a week. And again, same thing, first two days, super exciting. And then days three to five, you know, he started seeing the same types of patients come back and running the same types of tests. And I was like, oh, I think this is more repetitive than I had thought, this is not, you know, solving a new problem and a new exciting patient every day. This is just repeating the same type of work. And so that for me was not, and I didn't gain as much joy from the one-on-one people interaction with the patient or, you know, helping them solve their particular problem as I had anticipated. So that taught me, I'd rather help a ton of people who I'd never meet than to help, you know, a few people who I have that individual relationship with. And so things like that where it I think helped me shape towards it. I, it was a

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm.

Shikha Avancha:

to be able to get to the things that I want. And

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm.

Shikha Avancha:

just serendipity on having the right experiences that taught me, these are the things that actually drive me and, and get me outta bed in the morning.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. That seems to be the theme that emerging as I speak to more and more people. So anybody who is in their early stages of their undergrad, they shouldn't worry about experimenting. That's the message, right.

Shikha Avancha:

Oh, absolutely. Like experimenting is fine. I, I don't think I had that confidence cause I felt like I had to build a really strong resume to be able to apply to jobs in like three years. And like, I shouldn't have a bunch of random stuff on my resume, but genuinely like, People like to see that you're experimenting and that you're trying different things and that you have something that you've taken away. And it could be just that, like, I tried this and then I realized I didn't like it.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm.

Shikha Avancha:

That's still a positive step in the direction of finding the thing that you want, even though it's not necessarily like a, I found something that I enjoyed. It's I, I found something I didn't like. That's still really, really

Pratibha Pandit:

valuable.

Shikha Avancha:

valuable

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm..Yeah. Process of elimination remains a very good method in many, many areas. How did you approach so you, these, you said your informational interviews, and then the, you know, these shadowing, what was your avenue? Was it simply getting on LinkedIn or such forums and then reaching out to people? Like how did you approach? I think that can be for a lot of people that not knowing where to start. Right. So how did you approach that? How did you get those opportunities?

Shikha Avancha:

I did two things. One, I went to our career center and I, I asked them where, well, how do I do this? Like these are, I'm interested in potentially being a doctor, like who do I talk to to figure that out? And they had, at Rice at least, they had this program called the Externship Program where, over winter break or spring break, they kind of offer alum the opportunity to, to sort of host one to five day shadowing opportunities. And so through that, I found that's how I found the neurologist that I wanted to shadow was one of these programs that he was hosting, over winter break where he said, I'm willing to take a couple students to, to walk through my practice. So I would start with your career center, and then second I would start on LinkedIn and specifically if, especially if you're, you know, a high school student or a college student, alum of your university or your school are really willing to chat with you. Like, I've taken so many calls from Rice students because I care about giving back to that community because that community gave a lot to me when I was a student.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm.

Shikha Avancha:

And so just filtering on LinkedIn, there's a way to do it when through your connections to look for just alum of your university, and then you can type in things like healthcare or marketing or consulting or whatever and see who comes up. And most of those people will be happy to take a message from somebody saying, you know, I'm a freshman at this university and I'm really interested in potentially going into this career path. Would you have 30 minutes to chat with me? I found a really high response rate with that. And then with my research opportunities, it was actually with the Texas Medical Center, I guess it's linked to Rice, but it's not technically under the university umbrella. I just sent cold emails and I said, I saw your research, and I'm a freshman and I'm really excited about this and I, I really wanna study this potentially. And do you have space in your lab for an extra under you. And I went in a lot of those conversations were, they weren't really interviews, they were more so, you know, this is what we do, these are the types of projects that we have. Is this something that's interesting for you? Will this help you get to where you wanna be? And so I think just recognizing that people are willing to help, they're genuinely interested in, in helping other people because they were probably helped by somebody else when they were in your shoes. And just knowing that, kind of almost like getting over that bias in your head, which I realize it takes a little bit of effort. That, you know, somebody doesn't wanna talk to me or somebody doesn't, you know, I'm, I'm being a burden by reaching out to somebody is, is genuinely not true. Like, people are excited to, to help the younger generation and help people figure out their passions.

Pratibha Pandit:

Yeah. Yeah. And believing in the power of cold call, right? That's one thing that nobody Yeah. I mean, I reach out to so many people for this podcast and I do get back people who don't know anything about me, so, that's believing in that power of cold emailing or cold call is important as well. Great. Any other resources you know, individual effort, individual initiative very important, I understand. Is there any resource that you would like to leave the audience with? If th those who are interested in this field and they want to like really understand better what are some of the resources that you would recommend?

Shikha Avancha:

So definitely recommend like reaching out to people and just understanding their, their career paths. Honestly Googling and like trying to understand more about the healthcare ecosystem and the different types of players in this space. And if you have any sort of inclination on where you might wanna sit, are you excited about things that are patient facing, are you excited about helping providers do their job better? Are you excited about like insurance and, and risk modeling and things like that? Like sort of understanding, is there one of these players that you are more or less inclined to work with. And then I think that'll be a good starting point also for that sort of second round of reaching out to people and, and understanding what their career paths might have been I don't have great, like websites or, or any sort of resources like that. Of course, if anyone has questions, feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to, to leave my contact information. Just be kind of a sounding board or, or bounce ideas off of me to understand if there's places in the this space that might make make sense for you.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Also about the schools you came across this program at Stanford Medicine, which is a, this interdisciplinary Grad programs are also emerging, right? They're not that prominent. They're, also emerging trend. How did you find that? And is there any specific way to look for it other than the regular college search process?

Shikha Avancha:

I think I literally googled like digital health graduate degree or something to that effect. And it came up. So this is a relatively new program at Stanford. It's, it's we, this the second year of the program, there is a more established one that runs at Duke I believe through their management school actually, and is, has been running for over 10 years. And the, the director of that program actually came over to Stanford and started this program for us. And so they're very similar set up and, and very linked in terms of the, the type of curriculum. And so those would be the two that I'd suggest if you're particularly interested in this intersection. I also, again, like I mentioned, looked at business schools and particularly business schools that had a very strong healthcare focus as another alternative to doing a specialized graduate program. If you're still, if you're interested in healthcare, but not necessarily sure if you want to commit to that.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Awesome. Thank you so much Shika. This has been very informative, and I'm sure a lot of the, you know, youngsters would find useful information from this. Thank you again for your time.

Shikha Avancha:

Of course. Thank you for having me.

To learn more about this field, visit US Food and Drug Administration's, Digital Health Center of Excellence webpage. American Medical Informatics Association, amia.org You can also join one of the many Slack work groups, such as, Graduate Healthcare Club. Healthcare Homies. HealthTech Founders. PMs in Healthcare and many more. This is Career-Calling. And I'm your Pratibha Pandit Thank you for joining me today.