If you want to give back to your community or have a business that’s continuously in demand, healthcare is your best bet. According to Deloitte’s latest report on the healthcare industry in the U.S. and worldwide, the industry isn’t slowing down anytime soon. The consulting firm sees the growing and aging population, plus the rise in chronic diseases to be the main drivers in healthcare demand and spending.
Deloitte also projects that the industry will reach about $10 trillion by 2022, with its 5.4% growth rate. It continues to be ripe for innovation, as personalized medicine, new payment models, and tech solutions like wearables and cloud technology are being introduced to the mainstream. With healthcare franchises on the rise as well, there’s no better time than now to get into the business, even if you don’t have any experience in the medical field. Here’s how you can be successful.
Transfer Your Skills
Healthcare is quite diverse, as you don’t really need to be a doctor or a nurse to take part in helping lives. If you have a background in computer science, you can apply for a position in a hospital’s IT department, where you get to optimize the delivery of patient records, digital laboratory results, and more. You can also start a business dedicated to engineering healthcare software. For marketers, there’s always the pharmacy or the hospital’s marketing and communications department. The possibilities are countless!
Get Trained
If you really want to be in the frontlines, though, you need to get official training. Luckily, a lot of medical positions don’t need a bachelor’s degree. To be a registered nurse, you only need to get an associate’s degree, which you can often get in two years or less. You have to pass the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX), but there are a lot of online resources and review centers that can get you ready for it.
If you want to serve as fast as possible, you can also aim for a pharmacy technician position, where you get to supply patients with medication from their prescriptions. You can also train to become a medical coder, where you interpret doctor’s and nurse’s notes to list down the kind of treatments your patients went through and turn them into medical codes for documentation. Certificate programs for both positions can be finished in as little as nine months.
Start Your Own Healthcare Business
Apart from franchising a medical facility, there are many ways to create a business out of healthcare. You can set up a telemedicine firm where customers can directly talk to doctors and other medical experts on the telephone or video chat for diagnosis and treatment. With outpatient care continuing to grow over the years, as it grew by 45% between 2010 and 2015, a medical equipment business may also be profitable.
The healthcare industry remains strong in the United States. Demand is always growing, and medical innovations continue to be made to meet them. Whether you’re doing it out of the goodness of your heart or you’re just looking for a career change, you’ll have a profitable future in improving the health of others.
