Course Preview: Excel for Healthcare Professionals

I’m happy to share my tentative curriculum for a new course on Excel for healthcare professionals.

The motivation to blog about Excel was for analysts in general but more specifically for healthcare professionals. 

When I started working in healthcare, I was shocked at just how difficult it was to work with data. I’ve got lots more to learn, but here’s what I’ve found most helpful so far.

Interested in the course? Sign up for updates and a special offer when the course comes out.

Thoughts on the curriculum? Comment or shoot me an email: george@georgejmount.com. 

I hope to have the course done by the end of the summer.

And now for the preview…..

Healthcare data is messy — learn how to control it with Excel

Highlights of this course:

Addresses solutions in Excel for real-life problems of working with healthcare data

Over two hours of video training — download them, yours to keep forever

Downloadable exercise files — follow along with the course

Discussion forum — ask questions and talk about the course with the instructor and other students

Why healthcare professionals should learn Excel

Healthcare is probably the most complex industry, so it should follow that its data is hard to handle. 

In my three years of experience as a healthcare business analyst, here’s what I found most difficult.

• Data is not joined — you must consolidate data from multiple sources for analysis
• Payroll and scheduling — every department schedules differently, and you’re left with a stack of calendars
• Revenue analysis — making sense of how charges are generated and trending
• Data cleansing — importing data from legacy systems with difficult data formatting, or coworkers who don’t know better
• Creating dashboards and reports that guide clinical decisions without distracting or overpromising

Excel can solve these pain points.

Who should take this course?

This course is best for:

– Current healthcare administrators and analysts looking to make sense of their data

– Nurses, physicians, and other clinical providers who are moving into managerial roles

– College and medical students who want a distinctive skill set as business leaders

Topics covered

Lesson 1 – Introduction

Why exactly is healthcare data so messy, and how can Excel help?

Lesson 2 – Scheduling and Personnel Management

Payroll is the most significant operating expense of a hospital. Yet there’s often no consistency or control in how people are scheduled. We will cover how to build schedules and payroll reports in Excel.

Lesson 3 – Revenue Analysis with PivotTables

Healthcare revenue is difficult to analyze. What departments or codes are they coming from? How are the collections? Trends can change on a dime. PivotTables can keep up. We’ll cover how to analyze revenue with PivotTables.

Lesson 4 – Cleaning Up Exported Data

Data often comes from legacy systems in hard-to-use formats. We will cover how to transform this into ready-to-use data with Excel.

Lesson 5 – Dashboards and Visualization

Dashboards and visualizations can make data easier to understand and act upon. But with poor design and project management principles, they will fail miserably. We’ll cover the basics of dashboards in Excel.

Lesson 6 – Conclusion

You know Excel — what’s next? I’ll share some thoughts on what the future means for healthcare analysts.

Get ready to use Excel for healthcare — sign up to my newsletter for updates and a special gift when the course is released.