What’s your background?
I grew up in China and moved to Australia in 2015. I attended Monash University and was initially interested in Finance and Economics and so majored in those areas in my undergraduate degree and then went on to complete Masters in Business Law and Accounting.
What were your first roles after Uni?
When I finished my Masters, I decided that I didn’t want to work as an accountant. I thought that a marketing/social media/events type job might be interesting, and took a position as a Marketing Assistant for a plastic surgeon.
It was in this role that I started to appreciate the power of data and the importance of this for making sound business decisions. However, there was limited scope for me to use or gain any data analytic skills. I decided I wanted to build my data analytic skills and so enrolled in the Monash Data Analytics Boot camp where, over 6 months, I learned everything about data analysis, both the soft skills and the hard skills.
Why did you apply to GMHBA?
When I graduated from BootCamp, I was really keen to use my new knowledge and skills. When I saw the Provider Insights Analyst job advertised at GMHBA, I thought that the job description fitted me really well and I also thought that if I can deal with private health, then I can deal with anything as it’s a really complex industry! I felt that GMHBA was a good fit with the experience that I had gained in the medical field.
Tell us about your role as a Provider Insight Analyst?
As a Provider Insight Analyst, I worked with the data related to health care providers – like optometrists, hospitals, specialists etc.
The most important thing that I analysed is the provider’s behaviour – I looked at the providers fees for the services that they provided to their patients, and what the patients out of pocket expenses were for those services. This is then correlated with other data – so that we can figure out the roadmap of provider’s behaviour. We also analysed how their claims were submitted to us, and checked for the way to improve business decisions etc. This was all done using tools such as MS SQL, QlikView and Python.
Tell us about your next role in the Business Intelligence (Finance) team
After about a year in the Provider Insight Analyst role, I was promoted to Business Intelligence Analyst in the Business Intelligence (Finance) team.
This role is very different. As a Provider Insight Analyst, it was more ‘on the ground’ level work and the data was all related to ‘providers & claims’.
In the Business Intelligence Analyst role, I’m looking at data from across the whole organisation – data that is related to our members, data related to the different private health insurance products that we offer, and even financial data about how the business is performing.
In the Business Intelligence team, I still do data extraction and analysis and coding is still a large part of my role, but with a broader focus. Also, in this team, a really important part of our role is to create dashboards and reports for other teams, so I get to interact with a wide range of people from across different teams at GMHBA. The BI team are going to be moving from QlikView to PowerBI soon, so I’m looking forward to learning more about this migration progress.
What do you think are the top skills needed for a business intelligence analyst?
The technical skills are obviously really important – I am coding every day, so you need to have an enjoyment of that.
Stakeholder engagement is also a critical part of this job as you need to understand the needs of different people from different teams at GMHBA to enable you to deliver the right thing.
Problem-solving skills are also essential so that you can get under the data and understand what the different users across GMHBA are looking for.
Why is this work important to GMHBA?
The work that we do can be likened to being a Chef – a Chef takes unappetising raw ingredients and adds the magic that turns the dish into something delicious! In the same way, we take raw data that is undigestible, listen carefully to your requirements, and add the magic that will turn your data into something valuable to you. Not a lot of people know how to do the data stuff – we save our colleagues a lot of time by automating the data extraction process and creating a dashboard that will help with their decision-making.
What do you enjoy about your job and working at GMHBA?
I really like the culture here – GMHBA is very people focused and I was so impressed by that when I first joined.
Before I started here, I had never been to a CEO Town Hall before – these are held each quarter at GMHBA. I really like the opportunity to hear the CEO speak about the company, it’s history, how we are going, and what are the plans for the future. Hearing this in person and directly from the CEO is great.
I also like GMHBA’s inclusiveness – there is great gender balance across the organisation and at management levels, and there is a lot of respect for women. We also have a diverse culture, a great mix of different people from different countries and religions. I am the ‘minority’ in Australia, but I feel really comfortable here!
What is interesting about this industry/PHI – what is keeping you here?
Private Health Insurance and Health Care is a growing industry and it will keep growing – I’ve seen first hand how the health industry is growing and changing constantly and I like that – the constant change keeps things interesting. I also like that every piece of data that I analyse is from a live human being - I like working with data that will help impact someone’s health journey.
Three pieces of advice for a new graduate?