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UK Career Advice: HealthTech Career Pathway

UK Career Advice: HealthTech Career Pathway
Leading UK organisations are addressing some of the world's primary concerns, such as climate, energy, infrastructure, and health, as innovative and maturing technologies continue to disrupt and revolutionise entrenched businesses. The value of technology in achieving people's physical and mental health needs has been affirmed by several large investments, including $100 million raised by Babylon Health, a digital healthcare app, and $70 million raised by Cera Care, a platform that connects healthcare professionals and patients. Perspectum, Neurovalens, and Nourish3d were among the healthtech companies in the specialised manufacturing sector that received $1.54 billion in funding.

The UK's healthtech sector has mobilised its world-class talent and abilities to aid in the campaign against the coronavirus, with startups collaborating with big tech firms to develop new technology solutions. From recording cases to assisting front-line personnel, lending crucial infrastructure and facilities, offering online patient care, and collecting and analysing data, large and small tech companies throughout the country are rising to the challenge to assist the government and the UK’s public healthcare system, the NHS. According to Caroline Dinenage, Minister of State for Digital, said: “Over the last month the UK’s HealthTech sector has shown why it is a global leader, quickly using its expertise to develop practical solutions to help the government and the NHS with innovative products and services to respond to those in need".

According to statistics from Tech Nation's Data Commons, presented by Dealroom. co, the UK healthtech business has been able to elevate since it is one of the strongest in the world, having garnered $7.7 billion (£6.2 billion) from worldwide venture capital investors over the last five years. After fintech, healthtech is currently the second-largest segment of the UK tech sector, with over 100 healthtech startups on course to become $1 billion organisations.

There are just over 3,000 healthtech companies and scaleups in the UK, with roughly 400 of them experiencing rapid growth during the last two years. In early 2021, Healthtech scale-ups such as Immunocore, Oxford Nanopore, Healx, and Babylon Health are advertising nearly 10,000 job openings.

Demand for HealthTech skills in the UK

Pharma and healthcare are under more pressure than any other industry in the UK and abroad. In the United Kingdom alone, the NHS undertook a massive recruitment push, which resulted in over 20,000 retired NHS employees returning to work and over 24,000 final-year students joining the NHS for the first time. Following the Covid-19 outbreak, an all-Ireland internet forum was launched to promote business cooperation, initially emphasising healthcare innovation. To help monitor the disease, the Welsh government has established a COVID-19 Symptom Tracker app. Presently, 38,000 people in Wales and 2 million people across the UK use the app.

The worldwide healthcare business has undergone a paradigm shift due to COVID-19. Medical professionals put their lives on the line to treat and save patients as the pandemic progressed, often facing infrastructure challenges. The patient care segment has seen the most development. Patient care can now be delivered in two ways: through hospitals, clinics, and virtual platforms. The demand for nurses and paramedics to provide care to patients in hospitals has increased. However, during the pandemic, there has been an equal increase in demand for internet healthcare. A nearly identical number of patients are treated at home, driving up demand for telemedicine and remote monitoring services.

COVID sparked interest in telemedicine and e-health, which allows doctors to examine, diagnose, and treat patients in far-flung locales utilising telecommunications technology. Jobs for health-tech specialists who will create the telemedicine network's workings and operations are rising. Consultations and skilled medical practitioners would be in high demand in two key segments: telecommunications and IoT. The expansion of telemedicine will immediately enhance product launches and strategic collaborations, allowing private players to expand domestically and internationally.

The National Health Service (NHS)

The National Health Service employs the largest number of international employees, over 200 nationalities consisting of 70,000+ EU nationals and 75,000+ Asian nationalities. NHS has relied on the global workforce since its inception, especially from Africa and South Asia. Healthcare is a significant employer in the UK, accounting for an estimated 6% of the total UK employment from 2016 to 2018. The NHS will require over a million extra employees over the next decade to fulfil rising demand. With increased digitisation, IT experts are the most sought-after talents, such as developers, digital project managers, IT Architects, IT Business Analysts, IT Change Managers, IT Auditors, IT Asset Managers, IT Administrators, IT Managers etc.

With approximately 1.3 million employees, the National Health Service (NHS) is one of the world's largest employers and the biggest in Europe. Everyone joining the NHS is promised a wage commensurate with their abilities and responsibilities, and they are given every chance to raise their pay via training and development. The NHS Pension Scheme is one of the most generous and extensive in the United Kingdom. Every new employee becomes a member immediately, and you will get an exceptional package of pension benefits completely secured against inflation and guaranteed by the government.

HealthTech jobs in the UK

HealthTech careers are diversified, competitive, and, most importantly, gratifying. Being a part of this thriving business, which is always developing, allows professionals to grow, educate, and go as far as they want. The issue of healthcare access and equity is considerably broader. It's a highly decentralised industry with numerous data privacy and legislative rules, which makes large-scale technological disruption challenging. Given these and other difficulties, healthcare technology will continue to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

In this context of employment, there are several crucial positions such as Project Managers and Digital Transformation Experts, Principal software engineers/developers, Data Scientists and Data Engineers, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning experts (AI, NLP, ML), Cloud Specialist, Cybersecurity Experts, Experienced front-end developers, Operating systems engineers, Experienced video game developers, Experienced UX/UI designers, Experienced Mobile App developers, Experienced back end developers leading the development of, or contributing heavily to major new technologies or open-source projects (e.g. blockchain, Scala, Golang, Elasticsearch etc) and Virtual and augmented reality developers.

Joining HealthTech sector

A diverse set of skills and experience is well recognised and rewarded within the health tech sector. For example, paramedics integrated with healthcare informatics, analytics, or medical coding. Another possibility is combining pharmaceutics or pharmacokinetics with UI/UX, data analytics, product or engineering. Such unique skill combinations will be necessary for healthcare technology in the coming years.

The growth of data in healthcare necessitates the use of skilled Healthcare Analytics to organise and analyse all of that data. There will be a high need for Network security engineers, information risk auditors, security analysts, intrusion detection specialists, cryptologists, and vulnerability assessors as healthcare businesses are increasingly turning to digital technologies to address rising customer expectations for improved access and quality of treatment at lower prices. Medical coding, a specialised field of competence in health technology, is likewise in high demand. It entails converting healthcare diagnoses, procedures, medical services, and equipment into universally accepted medical codes.

Talent that meets the requirement of working on mobile technology for health care may be in great demand. Additional mobile tech positions will emerge as the industry prepares to interact with the consumer/patient – whether through websites or digital platforms. Product managers and engineering leaders with a strong knowledge of data science and the ability to map stakeholder expectations in the face of changing regulatory and compliance regulations will play a critical role in the HealthTech industry.

Big Data, including AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and data science, will be in great demand. Job responsibilities that deal with sourcing, cleaning, and processing data to extract meaning and insights, as well as those that apply logic and statistical models to leverage structured and unstructured data to improve healthcare services, will experience a significant increase in demand.

Health tech businesses are searching for mission-driven individuals who can contribute to making the health system operate better for everyone. People who desire to perform deep-rooted work in healthcare data and technology and sincerely want to impact how healthcare is implemented and experienced are more likely to succeed in the sector. Moreover, with health technology on the verge of a digital revolution, there will be no shortage of career options involving technology for better patient care and experience, lower costs and more successful treatment pathways. Talents with a potent blend of business operations skills and a grasp of new generation technology will lead the global healthcare sector.

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