A Typical Workday Of The Physician In A Healthcare IT Company
In this article, you will read about the role and responsibilities of a physician working in an information technology company. You will find out details on how physicians can successfully carve a niche for themselves in the IT industry.
Unique Aspects of a Med-Tech Physician Job
An MBBS/MD physician/medical specialist in a med-tech company would never need a stethoscope. Instead, he/she would have to be content with a laptop. The exact nature of the workday would depend on their role.
Healthcare IT and BPO companies employ MBBS/MD doctors/physicians for multiple roles. These are mainly of two types, technical and managerial, with many positions having a significant overlap of both managerial as well as technical functions. These kinds of overlapping roles especially occur in cases of startup organizations and smaller companies, which cannot afford multiple dedicated specialists.
In larger companies with established business processes and customers, the physician is usually hired to support one of the specialized teams or units, namely, production, product development, training, quality, and project management teams. The names of these teams do indicate the specific nature of tasks that it will primarily concentrate on. Let us examine these functions in a slightly detailed manner.
Med-tech companies build a product-centered around specific parts of the healthcare system. For example, some companies may build products related to medical records in a hospital while others may build products related to billing and payments. Some companies may build products for the government or regulator while others may concentrate on building products for the patients or consumers. The large med tech companies may have a large number of products catering to different segments of the healthcare system.
The role of the physician who is part of the product team is to make the product fit for its customers and guide the development of newer products for addressing the unmet needs of customers. To correctly assess the needs of customers, the product team's medical specialist has to align himself with the market needs and customer needs. He has to closely guide the engineering team which is responsible for building the product, its user interface, and back-end work so that the customer experience of using the service is rewarding.
A lot of medical specialists' time is engaged in building medical databases that categorize and capture the medical information by the users. The medical specialist has also to align with computing technologies like artificial intelligence and integrated workflows and testing of products and identifying bugs or errors in the software before it is released to the customer. The product medical specialist perhaps works most closely with multiple IT teams than in all other roles combined. Thus, often the medical specialist would be interacting with the higher management of the company and current or prospective customers.
The medical specialist who joins the training team is directly responsible for converting freshers who are mostly just out of their colleges into productive employees who can be trusted to directly send the work to the customer. The job involves besides the actual conduct of training sessions to wide-ranging activities such as identifying the training needs of employees, preparing the curriculum, training manual, training aids, and scheme for evaluation of the trainees and certification. Trainees usually enter the system in batches and exit from the program after their successful completion of the training. The medical specialist acts as their mentor, trainer as well as a manager. The medical specialist has to closely work with the production team as well as the human resource and quality teams.
The medical specialist has to carry out all the above activities of the program and do the work meticulously and diligently. The medical specialist works in close coordination with the customer.
The medical specialist in charge of project management is a very responsible and high-stress job with the title of Medical Director or similar nature. Though it comes with these challenges it is considered a senior management position and is highly rewarded and looked upon as one of the highest positions that physicians usually climb up to in med-tech companies. The position would usually require frequent international business travel and high-quality networking, presentation, and communication skills as clients of IT companies as well as their teams are located in multiple locations spanning across countries and continents.
Few medical directors who learn and display phenomenal business skills will climb up further as CEO or Board of Directors of the company. Few of them with an entrepreneurial mindset will go on to open their own med-tech companies.
Did you get a pulse of a med-tech physician's journey? Feel free to share your views.
Views expressed are personal
Last Updated On 08/22/2019 07:30 PM
Healthcare IT and BPO companies employ MBBS/MD doctors/physicians for multiple roles. These are mainly of two types, technical and managerial, with many positions having a significant overlap of both managerial as well as technical functions. These kinds of overlapping roles especially occur in cases of startup organizations and smaller companies, which cannot afford multiple dedicated specialists.
 |
| Image Credit: |
The Role of the Physician in the Product Development Team
Every IT or BPO company is built around a product or service to its customers. Product development is a continuous never-ending process and even continues across product life cycles as old products become redundant and get replaced by newer products.Med-tech companies build a product-centered around specific parts of the healthcare system. For example, some companies may build products related to medical records in a hospital while others may build products related to billing and payments. Some companies may build products for the government or regulator while others may concentrate on building products for the patients or consumers. The large med tech companies may have a large number of products catering to different segments of the healthcare system.
The role of the physician who is part of the product team is to make the product fit for its customers and guide the development of newer products for addressing the unmet needs of customers. To correctly assess the needs of customers, the product team's medical specialist has to align himself with the market needs and customer needs. He has to closely guide the engineering team which is responsible for building the product, its user interface, and back-end work so that the customer experience of using the service is rewarding.
 |
A lot of medical specialists' time is engaged in building medical databases that categorize and capture the medical information by the users. The medical specialist has also to align with computing technologies like artificial intelligence and integrated workflows and testing of products and identifying bugs or errors in the software before it is released to the customer. The product medical specialist perhaps works most closely with multiple IT teams than in all other roles combined. Thus, often the medical specialist would be interacting with the higher management of the company and current or prospective customers.
The Role of the Physician in the Training Team
Training is a very demanding role in med-tech companies that are carrying out knowledge-based processes such as medical coding, billing, underwriting, insurance pre-authorization, literature search services, etc. These services are highly dependent on a workforce consisting mainly of paramedical graduates. To provide high-quality service the workforce requires extensive training and their programs may run into several months before they actually join the production team. |
| Image Credit: Pixabay |
The medical specialist who joins the training team is directly responsible for converting freshers who are mostly just out of their colleges into productive employees who can be trusted to directly send the work to the customer. The job involves besides the actual conduct of training sessions to wide-ranging activities such as identifying the training needs of employees, preparing the curriculum, training manual, training aids, and scheme for evaluation of the trainees and certification. Trainees usually enter the system in batches and exit from the program after their successful completion of the training. The medical specialist acts as their mentor, trainer as well as a manager. The medical specialist has to closely work with the production team as well as the human resource and quality teams.
The Role of the Physician in the Production Team
The medical specialist working on the roles of the production team is a full-time manager who leads a team of certified paramedical employees working independently to produce daily, weekly and monthly targets of work which is billed to the customer. The medical specialist is also their help-desk for all sorts of queries. This is perhaps the most demanding type of work in terms of daily schedules and has the usual challenges of team and operations management. Understanding the challenge, usually, the companies do have well-defined incentive structures for compensating the team and the medical specialist. The medical team and their manager are also accountable for the quality of the work and customer feedback/quality team's feedback.The Role of the Physician in the Quality Team
The quality team is responsible for developing a quality assurance program for the service and measuring the quality of the end product/service from the perspective of the customer. For this purpose, the team would conduct systematic audits on predefined as well as random samples of work and try to find deviations from the process. The errors or lack of errors are usually documented as daily, weekly, and monthly reports which are circulated internally as well as with the client. On the basis of their feedback certain lots of work could be rejected or reworked as well as the people responsible could be penalized or reprimanded. This team is a form of check and balance for the production system.The medical specialist has to carry out all the above activities of the program and do the work meticulously and diligently. The medical specialist works in close coordination with the customer.
 |
The Role of the Physician in the Project Management Team
The project management team is the overall revenue function or the profit and loss function of the process. The team ensures that customers remain happy as well as the project remains well coordinated among all the teams and meets the profit goals of the business. The medical specialist leading the project management function has to develop a high business sense and work most closely with the COO/CEO of the company. The medical specialist approves all the major decisions taken by the above teams and is responsible for charting out the growth path of the project.The medical specialist in charge of project management is a very responsible and high-stress job with the title of Medical Director or similar nature. Though it comes with these challenges it is considered a senior management position and is highly rewarded and looked upon as one of the highest positions that physicians usually climb up to in med-tech companies. The position would usually require frequent international business travel and high-quality networking, presentation, and communication skills as clients of IT companies as well as their teams are located in multiple locations spanning across countries and continents.
Few medical directors who learn and display phenomenal business skills will climb up further as CEO or Board of Directors of the company. Few of them with an entrepreneurial mindset will go on to open their own med-tech companies.
Did you get a pulse of a med-tech physician's journey? Feel free to share your views.
Views expressed are personal
Last Updated On 08/22/2019 07:30 PM
Author Profile
Dr. Naval Asija is a New Delhi-based non-clinical doctor having health administration postgraduate training. Since 2018, he has been writing/blogging full-time on health issues. In the past, he has worked for a decade in healthcare, in different organizations, namely Innodata India Pvt. Ltd., Win-Medicare Pvt. Ltd., National Institute of Health and Family Welfare, Integrated Disease Surveillance Project, and National Polio Surveillance Project. The author can be contacted through https://www.linkedin.com/in/navalasija/
Disclaimer
By using our website, we imply that you agree to its terms of use and privacy policy. For full details, you can refer to these documents by clicking the links: Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comments. The comments are moderated and hateful content or spam will not be published. The approved comments will go live within a day.