Has your organization strengthened their core with the help of our consulting team? Does your team feel more confident with how they use their data? If so, you are probably familiar with our very own Nishtha Adroja.
Nishtha is a consultant here at our Burlington headquarters. In today’s employee spotlight, she reflects on her career beginnings, offering advice to aspiring consultants and shares the importance of bringing care back into healthcare.
What is your role at Dimensional Insight? What responsibilities does that role entail?
I am a business intelligence consultant for healthcare applications. As a part of this team, I build applications for different areas of healthcare such as hospitals, surgery, ambulatory services, and a few others. A main part of my job is taking the data from our customers and understanding what they want, what their requirements are, and how they want to use their data. I then put that in a format that can be used for their organization where they can find some insight from their data. In general, IT includes a lot of customization.
I know that before becoming a consultant here, you were previously a software developer. How do the skills you used as a developer transfer into your current role?
I was a software developer for four years before I joined the Dimensional Insight team. I was working with a manufacturing company, doing supply chain management and they had an ERP. So, I was always related to the data. The main difference between working at Dimensional Insight and where I was working before is the domain. One is healthcare (Dimensional Insight) and I when I was in India, I was working in manufacturing. Generally, I feel that the responsibilities are the same in the sense that I know what data looks like, how to dig into the data, and what the numbers indicate. I never saw taking this role as extremely difficult. I always saw myself becoming a consultant eventually in my career.
Would you recommend those who want to become a consultant to follow a similar path as the one that you took?
Definitely. Since I did a lot of work with data early on in my career, I feel that I understand it really well. For me, the most challenging part was designing and visualization. Someone who has worked a lot on designing might also understand data more. And when they can start working on data using open sources and different technologies, they can get their hands on how to dig into data information. So, I do think that one can also make the transition from designer to consultant as well as from developer to consultant. The baseline is that they should understand their data.
What do you see as the biggest challenges in healthcare right now and how can the right approach to data analytics help solve them?
Healthcare is a huge domain. It’s like a big umbrella that has subdomains within it. Healthcare organizations are using advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to find a lot of data they can leverage in a lot of different ways. If we were to talk about the application that I’m currently working on (a surgery application), then the main focus is finding out if a hospital is utilizing their operation rooms properly or not. Larger hospitals want to make sure that every surgeon who has an assigned room for surgery uses the room properly during the time that has been assigned to them. Analytics helps them utilize the space, find out what their revenue is, and the supplies that they might need for the surgery.
Another concern is preventing provider burnout. Providers have so much responsibility. They have to do everything. They have to listen to the patient, take notes, send blood tests, interpret results, contact the patient and inform them. So, there are some speech recognition technologies that they are using where there’s a conversation between provider and patient and everything is recorded. If a doctor says to “place a blood report for patient X,” then it happens automatically. Then they get the result and then the result is followed up with the insurance. So, it helps a lot in healthcare. Eventually everything is going to be moving towards artificial intelligence. However, there’s always going to be a thin line between, “Do we want the machines making decisions?” or, “Do we want the doctor to make sure that these are the results and this is what we want to do?” rather than making a decision based upon the data that they are testing on.
What do you hope to see in healthcare technology in the next five to 10 years?
We may see a larger use of robots. If you go to Lahey Clinic, you will find robots that carry medicine from one place to another. That has already happened now… so just imagine what they can do 10 years down the line. There are a lot of ideas out there, it’s just a matter of whether it’s going to be accepted or not.
One of the main things that I would hope to see is a change in how the physician and patient interact. In general, there’s just a lack of personal touch between the provider and the patient. There are a lot of complaints from patients, where they expressed that whenever they have a hospital visit, the doctor is more focused on taking notes in their laptops rather than having a conversation or making eye contact with them. The old ways of care, such as touching their hand or looking into their eyes and telling them that it’s going to be okay, are not practiced anymore. There are a lot of companies that are working towards making sure they bring back empathy into the exam room, so physicians can focus on the patient. I think it will be possible in the future to sit in an exam room and talk to a doctor and everything else is taken care of by technology.
What is the most rewarding aspect of your job?
When a customer tells you that they are very happy with what the product does and that we made the application very user-friendly for them. Their happiness is rewarding because everything that we do is customer-based and we want to get good feedback from them. Also, since we are helping out healthcare organizations, you feel like you are giving back to help others. Whatever hospitals need to make their organizations better is what we provide them with.
When you’re not in the office, what do you like to do in your free time?
I love cooking, so I spend a lot of my time doing that. I also love to be outdoors, so I like to go on walks or sit by the river. I live in Lowell, which has beautiful river walks, so after work I will usually take a book or a cup of tea and just sit there. On the weekends, I try to explore new towns and new places. I came to the U.S just two years ago and I feel that there’s a lot that I have to see and a lot that I have to understand culturally and historically. New England has so much history, and there’s just so much to learn.
Do you have any spots that people should check out this summer?
I really love going to Newport. It’s beautiful. There are huge mansions that were once summer houses in the 1800’s that you can tour.
Thank you Nishtha! Interested in meeting the rest of our team? Read our other employee spotlight profiles here.
- DIUC19 Day 4: Final Training and Farewell - August 8, 2019
- DIUC19 Day Three: Sessions and Product Showcase - August 7, 2019
- 4 Ways to Sabotage a Data Analytics Project - July 25, 2019
