167: Hiring Manager Explains: How to Become a Healthcare Analyst (Jason Bryll)

[00:00:00] Avery Smith: So you wanna be a healthcare analyst. In today's episode, you're gonna get a complete masterclass on how to do so from my friend Jason Brill. Jason's got almost two decades of healthcare analytics experience, and he'll explain exactly what healthcare analytics is, why it's really needed in today's market.

[00:00:18] Avery Smith: What role AI is going to play and how you can stand out to managers in the hiring process. So if that all sounds good, let's go ahead and get into it. Jason, welcome to the Data Career Podcast. You have a very unique career because you studied finance in college, and yet you've really ended up in the healthcare analytics space.

[00:00:37] Avery Smith: You were a senior financial analyst. A manager of financial analysis, a director of analytics, and now you started your own data consulting company, parable Associates. That was in 2018. So you build dashboards, you do vendor performance monitoring, you do analytics for healthcare focused companies. How did a finance major kind of end up, uh, in this healthcare analytics space?

[00:00:59] Jason Bryll: Well, my, [00:01:00] my foray into healthcare was kind of happenstance, and so when I was in college, just through networking and, and friends, was invited to interview at a young consulting firm in the healthcare industry, um, based outta Chicago, which at the time was known as Accretive Health. Now it's R one, which is quite a large firm at this point.

[00:01:18] Jason Bryll: But that got me into healthcare and what I was doing primarily at that time, coming right outta college was. Analyzing financial information, so all of the insurance claims that were being processed by hospital systems, the invoices for vendors that were supporting those insurance claims and collections processes.

[00:01:37] Jason Bryll: I was analyzing all that data, so I kind of stumbled into it just through networking and then found, uh, what was at the time, a fairly small company. What really got me in there and made me the data person or guru was I took an Excel course in college. I really enjoyed it. I used it for typically financial modeling for not just healthcare, but for any industry.

[00:01:56] Jason Bryll: And it was the technology that that brought me to [00:02:00] healthcare essentially, like it was, it was kind of fell into healthcare once I got into it. I absolutely loved it. It's a very mission-driven industry that I've never left since I graduated in 2008 from Michigan State, so I've been with it ever since.

[00:02:11] Jason Bryll: Using tools like Excel and and, and many others.

[00:02:13] Avery Smith: I I love that you're like, it was my networking and my friends. 'cause a big, a big pillar of my platform is like, okay, your skills isn't really what ends up getting you jobs. It's really your network. So I love that you mentioned it. Can you give us like a definition of, of healthcare analytics?

[00:02:27] Avery Smith: Like what, to to you, what is healthcare analytics? I.

[00:02:29] Jason Bryll: So there's three categories. There's more than three, but we'll just start with three categories of healthcare analytics. So there's obviously the clinical side. I think that's what people mostly think about when you say health, healthcare analytics. So certain things around diagnosis codes.

[00:02:42] Jason Bryll: If you're the industry, they're ICD tens. And so there's a lot of complexity into how patients are diagnosed and how they're treated. There's procedure codes, CPT codes. You know, there's a lot of complexity in just the documentation of patient treatment, and then there's operational. So once you go into [00:03:00] a practice, you might not be thinking about it as a patient, but when you're getting placed onto a schedule and aligned with a certain provider, when you are getting patient statements in the mail, every one of these points that you interact with all are operational in nature to make sure the practice is up and running and healthy.

[00:03:17] Jason Bryll: And then the last part is really the financial, and I'll, I'll couple revenue cycle into that a little bit. And so that's all the insurance claims processing. So healthcare is very unique in that the person or the entity that's responsible for payment is often not even in the room, right? It's not the patient, it's Blue Cross, or it's Aetna, or it's Medicare.

[00:03:35] Jason Bryll: And so there is a, an entire industry just around getting, uh, collections made for those services being rendered. All three of those, right? So clinical, operational, and then financial. Slash RevCycle billing. All three of those could have their own data and analyst teams and groups, and they all have their own KPIs, their, their own nuances altogether.

[00:03:57] Jason Bryll: So it's an incredibly complex landscape that you can [00:04:00] go into multiple directions, uh, within healthcare. But those are the, those are really the three categories.

[00:04:04] Avery Smith: It's so interesting because yeah, I think most people when you, when you say healthcare analytics, they would think more of the clinical side, like the actual health side of things, like, you know, doctors.

[00:04:15] Avery Smith: Tests your health. But there is like a whole, like you said, like a whole business aspect to, to healthcare of like, you know, how are we paying for things? How are people paying us for things? How are we scheduling all of this? And I think that's a side of healthcare analytics that people don't necessarily think of.

[00:04:31] Avery Smith: So let, let me ask you this. Do you think that like. Depending on the company and depending maybe on where, where they're at in the, in the world or in the country. Like could a healthcare analyst and maybe like, I was gonna say revelations, but we're not getting any revelations. Maybe you are. Maybe our insights, uh, are that good revenue operations analyst and a financial analyst.

[00:04:50] Avery Smith: Could they have three, three people have three different titles, but they essentially do the same thing? Would you say?

[00:04:54] Jason Bryll: They would, as far as the technical nature, it could be a very similar job, but the target audience changes, [00:05:00] right? So as you, you're working on the, the chief medical officer and what their scope of work is, it would be completely different than operations.

[00:05:06] Jason Bryll: But either way, you're in a database, you're writing SQL codes, you're extracting information, you're, you know, grouping it together, analyzing it, providing insights. The, the actual technical part of it may be similar, but understanding the audience could be completely different. Right. And also with those different personas.

[00:05:20] Jason Bryll: So like, if you're thinking about on the medical side. I'll give an example where, um, there's a, a, a, a large urgent care technology company called Asperity, and they, they post these things on LinkedIn that say, here's what's happening with cold and flu season. And it, they, they'll show you like these heat maps and it's important to their business 'cause they're in urgent care.

[00:05:38] Jason Bryll: It kind of is a predictive model for healthcare across the country where you can actually see, you know, flu ticking up at the end of the year. I mean, it kind of goes from left to right across the country or whichever direction. Really interesting stuff. A lot of deep analytics in that, and obviously more on the medical side looking at diagnosis and reason for visit.

[00:05:55] Jason Bryll: And so like that is a very predictive forward looking planning. Do you [00:06:00] need more providers? Do you need more people on call to support the incoming influx of that, that population? And so it, you know, you can get really in the weeds on that piece of it. Then the other side is are you making sure you're getting paid for it?

[00:06:12] Jason Bryll: Do you have patients that have long wait times? And so now operationally I need to know how my waiting room is doing. And so I'm very in the weeds on today, like real time data as compared to these large predictive models. It's a longwinded answer to say we're all working with data in different ways, but the target audience kind of dictates.

[00:06:29] Jason Bryll: The type of work. So similar tools, different mindset on how you approach data, depending on who your, your target audience is.

[00:06:36] Avery Smith: Very cool. Let's, let's talk a little bit about, uh, more about Parable Associates. This is the company that you started. You guys help small healthcare companies, basically do.

[00:06:45] Avery Smith: Analytics looking at, uh, dashboards and, and creating KPIs for them and, and stuff like that. And I'm interested because we, we mentioned earlier, you know, some of the players in the healthcare space, of course you have the, the healthcare provider, then you have insurance. That's, that's a big one. And I'm curious like where, [00:07:00] where you guys sit, because I think about some of the students that have gone through my bootcamp, the data analytics accelerator, and one of the companies that has hired the most of our students is Humana.

[00:07:09] Avery Smith: So they're obviously a large insurance company in the United States. And so the insurance. Company has their own set of data analysts. I'm thinking about like maybe like a hospital might have their own set of data analysts, but I know one of your, one of your clients is like a dentist and I don't think many dentists, maybe like large national practice hire data analysts.

[00:07:27] Avery Smith: But is that the gap you guys fill or, or where do you guys come into play?

[00:07:31] Jason Bryll: Yeah, so you're right in that the insurance companies typically have a very large. Team of data professionals. Hospital systems have multiple teams depending on what they're trying to address. And then where we typically fit in is on the provider side.

[00:07:47] Jason Bryll: And so we provider being the healthcare provider, so we do a lot of specialty care. So yes, dental is in that mix. Um, ophthalmology, optometry. Podiatry, orthopedics, like there's all these different [00:08:00] specialties and dermatology, the list goes on, right? Of all these different specialties. And typically what happens is a, a doc that has, you know, or an, or a practice that has one to two docs, it may not have really significant data analyst needs.

[00:08:14] Jason Bryll: It's more of filling their schedule, making sure they get paid, and it's pretty, you can, you can handle that with a very, um, light lift. But we work with groups that start to get up into the 10 20. 30 providers, they start to get so large, they need more oversight into their practice. And so that's really the entry point.

[00:08:32] Jason Bryll: Um, I would say our, our target audience is anywhere from 20 to 200. We have some larger than 200 providers. So if you think about a provider count, the higher the count, the more complexity it can bring. They're not just worried about the things that we talked about earlier. They're also looking at incoming referrals and where are they coming from, where are these patients coming from?

[00:08:49] Jason Bryll: 'cause that's, that's really like a, a version of marketing for them. These are small businesses. If you take a step back and look at it, um, they all have websites. These practices all have websites. They need Google Analytics. They need to understand [00:09:00] who's interacting with their blogs and their traffic. You know, it's not a given that their schedule is full.

[00:09:05] Jason Bryll: So they're, they're very interested in net promoter score, things that are outside of the medical field. And so if you're a general analyst. Or in business or have worked with small businesses. Hopefully that sounds very relatable, right? Because that if you take a step back and look at it like this is a small business that we're supporting, so that's where parable comes in.

[00:09:21] Jason Bryll: You have a lot of medical professionals that are a group of providers, and they're not necessarily MBAs, but they're incredibly smart people, right? They've gone to so much, uh, schooling, gotten so much education. They're not an IT professional and they're not an MBA or a business professional, but they're running this practice and it is their practice and usually a group practice.

[00:09:39] Jason Bryll: So what we do is we come in and we provide that data expertise so we can do data pipeline, connect all their different systems, everything from scheduling to patient, patient input. So like all the clinical documentation, their practice data management and billing collections. Call center data, HRIS data, so all this information we can pipeline and, and typically we're using tools like Microsoft Fabric is [00:10:00] really, really getting some popularity right now.

[00:10:02] Jason Bryll: There's other snowflake, Databricks, other things as well, but we're piping that data into a central lake, ultimately producing BI reports most commonly in Powered BI and Tableau. With that when we have these dashboards and we implement them now these really, really smart people have the data visualized in a way where they can immediately make decisions or be more confident in their decision process and make sure their priorities are correct.

[00:10:24] Jason Bryll: When it comes to providing high quality patient care, look to expand into different services, how do they support their population of patients and make sure that they keep coming back? Right In dental. Dental, you gotta make sure your patients are coming back every single year for their annual visits and checkups, and then you have to support them as they have something documented.

[00:10:41] Jason Bryll: They might need some care or things like that. So how do you support them in that process? You gotta really have your data together in telling that story for you to know how to interact with the large, you know, group like that.

[00:10:52] Avery Smith: Gotcha. That makes sense. So your job is basically to get all the data into.

[00:10:56] Avery Smith: Uh, a usable place and a usable format, and then show them some, [00:11:00] some key insights from it. That, that makes a lot of sense through the words. I, I saw on your guys' website I've heard you, uh, talk about before is revenue cycle and accounts receivable. For us laymen that don't know much about like healthcare, can you just explain the definitions of like, what is revenue cycle and what is accounts receivable?

[00:11:17] Jason Bryll: Yeah, absolutely. I, I think a lot of people are shocked to hear this at first, but when you go see your, your dentist, or when you go see a medical professional for any service, maybe it's again in podiatry or some other specialty, when you have that visit and it's documented that provider's not going to get any payment whatsoever for that visit unless they collect a copay when you're in the office.

[00:11:39] Jason Bryll: But other than that collection. They're not receiving the majority of their payment for about 30 days, sometimes longer if there's an issue with that payment or that process. The reason for that and, and where do you catch these gotchas? That that is the revenue cycle. And so the revenue cycle really starts in patient access, and so patient access is.

[00:11:57] Jason Bryll: If you are referred to a specialist [00:12:00] and your primary care physician says, Hey, you need to go see this dermatologist for that spot on your skin, a lot of times that is required by the insurance company. They say, we're not gonna pay this dermatology visit unless we authorize it. So there's these authorization codes that they'll give you.

[00:12:15] Jason Bryll: Then you have to take it, be referred to somebody that's in network, and when you're scheduled, those codes come over. So that way when it goes out to Blue Cross, they say, oh yeah, we authorized that. Based on that diagnosis, we authorized you to do that. So we will pay for it. And so there's this behind the scenes work that's being done, communicating between the providers of care and the insurance companies for covering that care.

[00:12:36] Jason Bryll: And most people don't know how complex that it, it really gets. And what that does is it delays payment. In healthcare, the hot topic right now, if people are listening and like, okay, that sounds, you know, pretty burdensome. There's also this concept of denial of payment. And so if you don't have that authorization code or you do something that you weren't authorized to do, go above and beyond in in, in providing care.

[00:12:57] Jason Bryll: You can get denied for payment. And that's a really, really [00:13:00] hot topic in healthcare right now. And I encourage anybody who is, uh, interested in finding a job in analytics to, to dive deeply into research and denials because they're going up. Pretty dramatically right now in the industry. It's a great opportunity to learn how operationally your insights and analysis can, can create predictive models or, uh, impact how healthcare providers and accelerate that reimbursement.

[00:13:22] Jason Bryll: 'cause if you're denied, then you, you start the clock over, it's another 30 days now you provided a service. You don't get paid for 60 days. That's a lot of carrying costs for a practice. So really RevCycle is everything from patient access through billing a claim out the door to the insurance company.

[00:13:37] Jason Bryll: Getting paid and posting that payment against that receivable. And there's, there's so many steps along the way. It's incredibly complex, which is why it really requires or necessitates its own analyst team or analyst skillset. There's so many different workflows along the path that. If you know how to work with data, write great code, or even just create great [00:14:00] visualizations, you can find those gaps or where, uh, claims might be falling through the cracks or delayed for payment, you can find 'em so much more quickly.

[00:14:06] Jason Bryll: And that really helps support for us, it helps support our clients, but you know, those that you serve with, with the data.

[00:14:12] Avery Smith: Very interesting. So, yeah, I think, um, part of the problem I've had with like wrapping my hand ar around what this is, is like if you look at like my business, my bootcamp, right? I have like one price point.

[00:14:23] Avery Smith: The people who are benefiting from the product are the people paying for it. And, uh, in order to enjoy the product, you, you pretty much pay upfront. Now, that does get more complicated when I do like payment plans for people because people's credit cards fail and they're, they expire and, and stuff like that.

[00:14:39] Avery Smith: So that does imp. Or increase the, the complexness of it all. And so it's like, okay, well that's only for one product, for only, you know, not that many people. Versus like a ton of people, a ton of different products. Every time they come in, they're getting probably multiple and maybe different things, and some of those are gonna be approved and they have different insurances and you're bringing multiple third [00:15:00] parties into it.

[00:15:00] Avery Smith: I can see how that gets really complicated really quickly. You'd need someone to take care of it. So is that like what makes healthcare data really difficult is like basically there's like so many different products. Everyone literally has it. Like I have two kids and my two kids go to the doctor like what?

[00:15:15] Avery Smith: Every other month basically. And they always have stuff going on it feels like. And then like this doctor's system is not the same as this doctor's system. And then there's my insurance and my wife's actually on different insurance. And that's, is that what kind of makes this whole thing difficult?

[00:15:28] Jason Bryll: That is a big portion of it.

[00:15:30] Jason Bryll: So yes, I'll, I'll tell you a little bit like what I hear when you're talking through that. Just as a data professional in the healthcare industry, when you say, I have this insurance and then my family's on this insurance, I'm thinking about a guarantor patient relationship. There's a responsible financial party, which adds complexity to it, where you know, the parent is the guarantor.

[00:15:47] Jason Bryll: They're the one that really, ultimately the statement goes to, and so that's one layer of complexity. You might go to a different provider than your children who maybe go to a pediatrics office. So they don't necessarily know like the family history. They can't [00:16:00] just pull it from your chart 'cause it's over here in a different organization.

[00:16:02] Jason Bryll: And then even that o organization may be on a different medical record software system. So even though it sounds like, well, can't you just pipe my data over here? Aren't you guys friends? You're in the same zip code? Right? It's not that easy either, because that data ingestion may not. Exist even across different platforms.

[00:16:18] Jason Bryll: So there's a ton of complexity because again, you have so many different systems. If you just were to look up how many different medical record software companies there are on the hospital side, we see a lot of Epic is is a big name that you hear a lot of. Cerner is a big name, Meditech. But then get into specialty care and there's a whole group.

[00:16:38] Jason Bryll: Um, I mentioned disparity earlier in urgent care. There's web, bt and physical therapy. There's Mod Med and Multi-Specialty. So there's all these different platforms. Every one of them is their own business, their own entity, and they're typically servicing a very well, a specialty, a very specific group of individuals or provider types.

[00:16:54] Jason Bryll: And there's a lot of value in that because that niching down has really helped them grow as a business and solve the [00:17:00] problems and pain points of that specialty. And so that's why they have those softwares. But it doesn't mean that everything talks together. And so interoperability would be the term that I would use.

[00:17:08] Jason Bryll: But interoperability does tend to be a challenging point. So if you go to a specialist and then go to a hospital, they may not have all your data. And then that's more on the clinical side and operational side. And so those data pipelines that there are companies that support or they do help with, there's things called HL sevens that have been around for a long time to help stream or pipe that data from one organization to the next.

[00:17:28] Jason Bryll: Um, API calls all sorts of stuff different, different ways to, to get things over. On the financial side, again, it's, it's the complexity of the insurance companies and the relationships and, um, the types of services being rendered. If, if you think about it in terms of, I always say give empathy to each party when understanding, like the motives behind why is, why is healthcare billing so complex?

[00:17:48] Jason Bryll: If you think about the provider they wanna provide. Excellent patient care and get somebody healthy. That is their motivation. And then ultimately they want to get reimbursed accurately and timely for that service. And then [00:18:00] you have the patient who has been paying this insurance company for some sort of coverage and maybe they totally understand it and maybe they don't understand it at all, but they know they have this insurance coverages over here.

[00:18:10] Jason Bryll: Then you have insurance. Insurance is really making sure that they're operating on behalf of the patient. And so they don't wanna pay for services that they shouldn't have to. And so they feel like they're protecting the patient. But now we've created this triangle where there's a provider who wants to do anything they can to help the patient.

[00:18:26] Jason Bryll: Maybe that's above and beyond the line of, uh, you know, what was already authorized. And then the insurance company says, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do excess work like that. And so they'll deny payment. So now we have this triangle of. Complexity because you and everybody is doing the right thing. I don't wanna, sometimes you get into healthcare and you, you hear like, oh, this is, who's the bad guy in the mix?

[00:18:46] Jason Bryll: There is no bad guy. It's just, it's really complex and you have to kind of find that equilibrium imbalance. And 80% of the time. Everything flows perfect on the reimbursement side, and 20% of the time there's a denial or an issue or something that creates [00:19:00] longevity in the reimbursement cycle and all that confusion, which is a really high percentage when you think about the volume.

[00:19:04] Jason Bryll: But yeah, you have multi-party over here and yes, you do have interoperability. You know you're one patient, but every time you go somewhere new, you're creating a brand new record within that, a host system, whatever that practice is. So there's your data's all over the place. Um, and your family's data too.

[00:19:20] Avery Smith: Very interesting. I feel like, I feel like I just learned a lot and I heard a lot of words that I maybe know the definition of that maybe haven't ever used before or something like that. Um, and it, it is really complex. And this got me thinking this takes a lot to under to understand, like, I have, my wife's a nurse, so she knows some of this stuff, but like, I've never worked in healthcare.

[00:19:38] Avery Smith: I've never worked with a, with a healthcare company. I don't even think so. I was thinking like, let's say, let's say that there's, they're, they're building a new. Hospital in, in Utah or something, right? And I wanna take my consulting company, snow data science, and I wanna do data analytics for them. Well, let's say you're also bidding for that, that same contract.

[00:19:54] Avery Smith: You're gonna blow me outta the water because you understand, let's say even my company, we're [00:20:00] better at Tableau, we're better at sql, we're better at the data warehousing stuff than, than you guys. Right? You guys are still gonna blow us outta the water because we don't know anything about the domain and all those fancy things.

[00:20:10] Avery Smith: And you know, I, I knew Epic, but the other ones, I have no idea. I've never even heard of them before. So I was just curious, like what role has, have you seen in your career domain play and like domain experience and because the other, the other reason I wanted to bring this up was you were listening to the episode I did with Melody Santos, who went through my program and then went through your course.

[00:20:28] Avery Smith: She was a former physical therapist and then she transitioned into kind of a, a revenue cycle analyst now, and she was able to grab that role because of her domain. So I was just curious, like what role do you think domain plays in data careers?

[00:20:39] Jason Bryll: I, I think it's. Right now it's already an in an insanely important detail that you have to understand the operations.

[00:20:48] Jason Bryll: It is going to grow in significance in a very short period of time here, and I say that because we're on our side. We're already using a lot of AI technologies to help streamline SQL [00:21:00] code writing, take natural language questions and turn them into code. It's not perfect yet. We still have to audit it. We still have to be technically sound.

[00:21:07] Jason Bryll: Same thing with dashboard development and so on. These tools are helping accelerate the productivity or or enhance the productivity of us as analysts. The true differentiator is our depth of knowledge within the industry we serve. So to your point, yes, I would blow you out of the water in that scenario because.

[00:21:26] Jason Bryll: What they're looking for in a partner is not just somebody who's really sound in technical capabilities with Tableau, but can you get the answers to the questions that I have and can you predict the next question that I may ask? And can you verbalize it to me in a way that I understand and can read and react quickly?

[00:21:44] Jason Bryll: And the only way you can do that is being really deep on understanding the operations and the workflows. I'll tell you one of the things that we've done as a business is every one of our project managers has a deep knowledge of healthcare and a knowledge or certification within one of the BI [00:22:00] applications or data engineering applications.

[00:22:02] Jason Bryll: But I'll tell you like it is definitely 90% of their conversations are more on the operational side and seeking to understand. What is the pain point? Why is it a pain point? Have you tried this? Have you tried that? Oh, by the way, our other client with a similar issue did this. Now I can relate a different issue to yours because your healthcare practice, their healthcare practice, it's a massive, massive benefit because you talk the same language.

[00:22:26] Jason Bryll: And I'll tell you one of the most critical reasons why is when somebody's looking to hire you as an analyst. Or they're looking to hire you as a consultant organization. They are also thinking about themselves and how much time they have to put into the project. So if you come off sounding like, I can do all of this technical development and I can take that burden off your shoulders, that's great, but how much time do I have to spend with you telling you.

[00:22:50] Jason Bryll: Exactly how a dashboard should look. Here's how to calculate a certain measure. Like I need a dashboard with DSO ar over 90 agents slash touch. And you're like, what's a [00:23:00] touch? Like what do you define as a touch? Or what is DSO? I don't even know what that is. Let me Google how to calculate it. That is time that they're burning that they don't have, they wanna hire you.

[00:23:08] Jason Bryll: They wanna bring you into the organization with some understanding that you empathize with their role, their position, and you can accelerate through those conversations. They don't want to spend any extra time. They want a done for you service program team member. And you're never gonna find a perfect, you know, resource.

[00:23:24] Jason Bryll: But the more you can act like that, the better. Um, so that's. That we lean hard into that in our discussions and our marketing, but also operationally and training, as you mentioned, you know, the academy course that we built, a lot of that was actually built for internal consumption. So when we onboard people, we can catch them up to speed with all the things that we're doing within healthcare and rev cycle.

[00:23:45] Jason Bryll: So they're going into clients highly educated on, on what those topics are.

[00:23:48] Avery Smith: So if, if I heard you right, like domain experience has always been valuable, but an age of ai, you think it's only going to be more valuable because basically everyone, not everyone, [00:24:00] but a lot of people will have equal tech skills.

[00:24:02] Avery Smith: So the thing that really sets you apart is your ability to actually understand. Your domain and the business problem and the, the business jargon, that's what's going to basically set you apart. Is that what you're kind of saying?

[00:24:14] Jason Bryll: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, not just the bus business jargon, but one step further.

[00:24:18] Jason Bryll: And if, if, if you can, if you're the problem solver type of person, one step further into the solutioning. So you can use data to identify certain things. You can calculate certain measures, but then take that, that power that you have of combing through data and take it one step further, make a recommendation with it that's specific to that industry or workflow.

[00:24:37] Jason Bryll: And it could be supply chain, it could be anything, right? But like, or in your other podcast I was listening to, talked about, you know, you could do it in retail or you could do it in um, you know, the restaurant business. There's all sorts of things. Like if I knew anything, I don't know anything about the restaurant business, but I imagine spoilage.

[00:24:53] Jason Bryll: Some, you know, concern that they have with things sitting on the shelf for too long. So if you had great analytics about it, you could make a predictive model and when [00:25:00] you should create an order for your lettuce, I don't know. You know what I mean? Like I, you could, you could beat me in that conversation, I'm sure when it comes to healthcare.

[00:25:07] Jason Bryll: Now I'm, I'm thinking ahead and now I know those workflows so well. It's just, it's incredibly powerful. People, again, they want a. Something done for them. They're looking for you to take it as far as you can and then give 'em the handoff so they can make the decision and feel confident and empowered that you've done your qa, you've done the quality audit, you've done the next layer of research, and you're giving them the most qualified information, and there's a trust there.

[00:25:30] Jason Bryll: That trust only comes through. Deed knowledge within a certain specialty or, or industry niche.

[00:25:36] Avery Smith: So it makes sense from a, like a consultant standpoint that these hospitals, you know, they wanna hire people that, that know hospital stuff, but like, is that something I don't, I don't know how big, uh, parable Associates is right now in terms of employees, but you've obviously, uh, hired quite a few people.

[00:25:51] Avery Smith: Is that something that you look for in your hiring process?

[00:25:54] Jason Bryll: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So we have roughly 30 employees right now, and we are always [00:26:00] prioritizing healthcare experience. Now, we're fortunate enough to do that because we're small enough, we're not doing a lot of college hires. If I was doing college hires, I would be looking for technical experience, and I would have my training program to fill those gaps.

[00:26:12] Jason Bryll: But I would also set an expectation that that's, you know, what I'm looking for is to grow somebody given 'em the career development and so on. So those opportunities are there. But I'll tell you, you know, when I graduated from college in 2008, I don't know that, I don't know when YouTube really got off and running.

[00:26:28] Jason Bryll: I. With a lot of, uh, details and other platforms, podcasts like yours and alike, but just getting the first layer of understanding, getting interested in some sort of industry. There's so much content, whether it's YouTube or whether it's just, you know, uh, or even joining a course like yours and having a community or a cohort like these, like just grouping together.

[00:26:48] Jason Bryll: Building that base knowledge at least demonstrates some level of understanding and that you're willing to learn in within a certain industry. Demonstrate some of that, uh, when you're in the interview process. I [00:27:00] can't recommend it enough, but yes, we look for healthcare experience and we look for people who are genuinely interested in the industry, whether it's clinical, operational, or financial.

[00:27:07] Jason Bryll: If you have one of those, it's a, it's a good chance you'll at least get an interview with us.

[00:27:12] Avery Smith: When you say demonstrate, what, what do you, what exactly are, are you meaning?

[00:27:16] Jason Bryll: I'll, I mean, specifically when we're combing through resumes, if somebody has a portfolio, we'll jump into the portfolio. If they don't have a portfolio, if they have history in the healthcare industry.

[00:27:26] Jason Bryll: That's a plus if they have no experience whatsoever, but they're part of certain groups or communities that they're documenting again on their resume or what have you, if they're following certain people. If I ask you like, who do you follow online? I, and those are the questions I ask too, because that tells me, here's what you're interested in.

[00:27:42] Jason Bryll: What we're looking for is who's genuinely interested in the work that we're doing, and then we can get deep rest like, why are you interested in healthcare? You know what, what specific area of expertise you're looking for. Show me something that tells me that you're interested in technology and the industry, whether it's, again, part of a club portfolio [00:28:00] or just prior work history.

[00:28:01] Jason Bryll: Show me something. Awesome.

[00:28:03] Avery Smith: We, I am a very strong proponent of portfolios, so that's what I was hoping you were gonna say. I didn't know, but it was, uh, yeah. Uh, I'm glad, I'm glad that's what you said because, uh, I, I agree. I think portfolios are much more powerful than anything you can have on your resume.

[00:28:15] Avery Smith: 'cause it's like literally. Tangible evidence that you can do, that you can do cool stuff that you can analyze.

[00:28:19] Jason Bryll: Let me hit on something about portfolios really briefly. If you have a portfolio, have somebody else QA it, look at it, have it be a really good portfolio. Don't put junk out there in the atmosphere.

[00:28:29] Jason Bryll: Have something that's polished and clean. No spelling errors. You'd be surprised at how often we get that our portfolio is an is a major plus until it's a negative. Mm-hmm. So don't give me something to pick apart and say, why did you do that? Oh, you missed that. Oh, that's sloppy. Have it be super polished if you have one.

[00:28:47] Jason Bryll: To some extent it's as important as your resume, right? I'm going to look at it. I'm going to get in the weeds on it, and it's a major plus if you have one, but make sure it's a high quality. Portfolio for me, it doesn't have to be [00:29:00] healthcare. If you have healthcare experience and you have a portfolio using dummy data or data from the audience that's publicly available, different industries, just show me that you, you're, you're demonstrating technical expertise.

[00:29:09] Jason Bryll: The best portfolios that I've seen also include some sort of a page with documentation that says, here's kind of some of my underlying queries. If I'm using Power bi, here's the DAX code that I used. Just give me something. That tells me a little bit more of your approach, and that is a, that's a major win for us as well.

[00:29:27] Jason Bryll: If we can walk through the thought process and we're not looking for perfection because we know that we'll, we'll train you on, you know, CTEs and sql and we'll train you on certain things and how we, how we approach. Data and analytics, but at least give us the thought process. Show me it's intentional.

[00:29:43] Avery Smith: Love that. Yeah. We try to do long project writeups or recorded little five minute loom videos when we do our projects. And that's one of the reasons why I, I hate on on GitHub a lot of the time, is because people will consider GitHub a, a portfolio, which if done correctly, it totally [00:30:00] can be. But a lot of the times people just throw up SQL queries in GitHub and they're like, portfolio, or they send you a link to a Tableau, uh, public page and they're like, portfolio.

[00:30:08] Avery Smith: And it's like, okay. That's great. That's part of it, but like we have no idea what you were thinking. We have like, no idea on your, your approach to this data set. We just know kind of not even with the SQL code, the end results, we just kinda know the middle results of, of this sequel. So I love that you mentioned like try to give more a of, of a realistic full 360 view of what your approach was to it because you're, you're doing it to show this is how I would try if, if higher on the job.

[00:30:33] Avery Smith: This is kind of what you would expect from me. Basically, this is the best representation. I can give to you of what I would, what it would be like to hire Avery as an analyst. Does that, did you agree with that?

[00:30:42] Jason Bryll: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And if you, I mean, again, as, as far as putting the polish on it, making sure it's a sound, um, you know, portfolio and, and a sound example that you'll do if you put a number of hours into it, the value on the other side's fantastic too, because that portfolio is a, is an investment in you.

[00:30:58] Jason Bryll: It's an, it's an [00:31:00] asset to you as an individual, as a, as a professional. And you can easily apply to multiple positions and use that same portfolio, right? So it kind of, it's worth the, especially in the competitive landscape we have today with hiring, I mean we, when we put a posting out there, we get hundreds and hundreds of applications.

[00:31:17] Jason Bryll: It's incredible how much talent is out there that's actively seeking opportunities. So if you really wanna stand out, first of all, build it, that automatically puts you in the top 20 percentile easily, because nobody. No, not enough people are doing it. Right. Two out of every 10, 20% are even doing something at all.

[00:31:33] Jason Bryll: And then give, gimme high quality, now you're in the top 10%. So it's a differentiator and it's worth the investment when you're being, you know, put into such a competitive landscape. Highly recommend. It

[00:31:42] Avery Smith: makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you something you mentioned earlier, uh, in terms, in terms of tooling, data, tools that you guys use.

[00:31:49] Avery Smith: You know, you mentioned fabric, you mentioned Snowflake. We've, we've talked about power, bi, sql, Tableau. Do you guys do, like, do you guys have like a data stack that you kind of stick to? Or, or do you [00:32:00] kinda have to be flexible for what your, your customers and clients want?

[00:32:02] Jason Bryll: We typically recommend Microsoft, and so historically it's Azure, Azure Data Factory, the tool set.

[00:32:10] Jason Bryll: They've rebranded a lot of it as fabric a a one data stop analytics platform. Um, we're a big fan of fabric. We've been able to do a lot of really impactful things with it every, and we do everything from the data engineering side, adjusting the data, whether it be. Connecting and doing like snowflake mirroring is available now, stuff like that.

[00:32:26] Jason Bryll: But connecting to different data sets, piping that data over, storing it, analyzing it, um, writing SQL code against it, and then the BI application itself. Power bi. Power BI has really taken a big leap. In the past, I'd say even like two years, maybe three years, like a massive leap in popularity. I think it's 'cause so many people have, you know, Microsoft Office.

[00:32:47] Jason Bryll: But we've done a lot of work with Tableau as well. So we're also Tableau experts and we've implemented Tableau at many other customers and clients love Tableau, love Power bi. I highly recommend those two [00:33:00] simply because of the opportunities that you can find, people are using those applications. That doesn't mean that I don't think there's value in other bi applications and tools.

[00:33:09] Jason Bryll: There's a a bunch of 'em out there, but I would say the majority of what we see in the industry is Microsoft Fabric, power bi. Tableau. Those are the two that we see the most of the other things that we see in the industry right now, we do work with Snowflake and we do work with Databricks. Um, those are two cloud platforms that I, I think are also worthy of, of note, but for the most part we're recommending Microsoft Fabric with our customers who don't already have something.

[00:33:33] Jason Bryll: And if they do, usually Microsoft, I would say. Probably 80% of our clients, if I think about it, uh, are using the Microsoft BI platform.

[00:33:42] Avery Smith: It, it makes sense. A lot of, a lot of people already have Power BI included in like their giant enterprise Microsoft deal. Mm-hmm. When I was at ExxonMobil, we had Power bi, uh, available I think to, uh, a majority of customers just from the Microsoft deal that we had, but we still used a fair amount of Tableau [00:34:00] as well.

[00:34:00] Avery Smith: Although those licenses were a little bit harder to come by as, as an analyst. So yeah, I, I think either of those are, are great things to, to build upon and, and learn as as well. Jason, I'm, I'm really curious, like what, what advice, like if someone maybe is watching this is, I know we had a nurse comment on my YouTube video last week, or, or maybe they're an occupational therapist, you know, these people who are, are maybe in fringe healthcare positions.

[00:34:26] Avery Smith: And they're like, I'm interested, you know, I'm a little tired of, of, you know, bedside clientele work. Like I'm interested in, in becoming a data analyst and having like a more nine to five desk job. Like what advice would you give them?

[00:34:38] Jason Bryll: When we hire people, uh, to be analysts, I'm gonna go in the reverse direction and then bring it full circle When we hire people to be analysts.

[00:34:45] Jason Bryll: I always try to do some sort of job shadowing or workflow, uh, review. So if somebody's, let's say doing insurance follow up and they're, here's the claim, here's the patient. I know it's 60 days old from the date of service, I'm gonna go to the Blue Cross [00:35:00] Blue Shield website, and I'm gonna, I. Type in this number and here's the result.

[00:35:03] Jason Bryll: And so we walk through that whole workflow. Then as an analyst, you can start putting the workflow together in terms of data. Oh, did they put a note in the system? What codes were here? How do we trend and chart that information? But seeing the workflow helps you understand better as a data analyst. Well now you're talking about people who know clinical workflows perhaps, or were, maybe they were in AR follow up or accounts receivable follow up following up on these claims, and now they wanna get into analytics.

[00:35:29] Jason Bryll: So you understand the workflow, but maybe it's worth job shadowing or talking to data professionals that are either in your own business or practice or through communities like yours. In seeking out how do I move data from A to B? How do I cleanse the data? What does the medallion, you know, uh, structure look like and why?

[00:35:49] Jason Bryll: And, but like you need to kind of see the tools. So I highly recommend reaching out to those in your network that you can, seeing if you can just see what it is they're doing. Go to YouTube, get some [00:36:00] documentation there. The only gotcha I'd say with YouTube is it's typically not curated content. It's not linearly taking you through.

[00:36:07] Jason Bryll: And so I highly recommend a course once you get to that point where you're like, this is something I'm interested in. I think I could do that. I would like to have that approach to, uh, a problem solving and using data. Become part like find a course that speaks to you, become part of it, but you understand the healthcare part.

[00:36:22] Jason Bryll: Now you need to understand the technical, so you need to see it. You need to start playing with these tools. Get the free licenses where it's available for different BI products and so on. You gotta start playing with it, you know, do some job shadowing, get your feet wet.

[00:36:34] Avery Smith: I love the, the job shadowing that's like something that I feel like is like almost disappeared from society and I feel like we should, we should bring it back.

[00:36:40] Avery Smith: Yeah. I, I, I love what you said also about like, get some hands on practice and I think that's something. We do well in, in our accelerator bootcamp is like we, we, we build real world projects on real world data and we kind of walk you through step by step of how to do the analysis. I think that's something that, that you do very well in the parable uh, academy, which I've had a chance to check out.

[00:36:59] Avery Smith: And we'll have a [00:37:00] link in the show notes down below where like, I feel like when I went through that, I feel like I was doing a, a job shadow where I was like. Literally following someone through step by step a, a real use case of like, this is what it's like, uh, to be like a revenue cycle, revenue analyst, or, or something like that.

[00:37:14] Avery Smith: Like actually, like this is what it looks like to be a healthcare analyst with kind of like the billing and accounts receivable and, and stuff like that. So I, I think maybe the. The job shadows have disappeared from society, but I think these are are pretty cool alternatives where you can kind of do it at your own pace and at your own schedule really conveniently.

[00:37:31] Avery Smith: So we'll have links to the show notes to all of that down below. And, uh, Jason, I just wanna say thank you. I feel like I learned a lot about being a healthcare analyst today, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners did as well.

[00:37:40] Jason Bryll: Yeah. Uh, I appreciate the, the platform to talk about it. We're always looking for more talent, so please go through these courses.

[00:37:46] Jason Bryll: Get acclimated to healthcare and then, uh, you know, keep an eye out for our postings 'cause we're trying to grow and expand. And I love this healthcare industry. I can't recommend it enough to anybody who's listening. Please look at healthcare, um, as a, as a, as a landing spot [00:38:00] for, uh, for your talents. Thanks for the time.

[00:38:02] Jason Bryll: Thanks for the opportunity.

[00:38:03] Avery Smith: Yep. Thanks for Jason.