Here at the Health Care & Science Career Community, we want to introduce students to a wide range of careers in those industries. Students may be familiar with popular clinical roles (nurse, physician, veterinarian), but not with jobs like healthcare data analytics or administration, or biotech research.
Livongo & Teladoc Health (a recently merged company) is “transforming the healthcare experience and empowering people everywhere to live healthier lives.” Teladoc is a leader in telehealth, or virtual healthcare, providing virtual primary health care, mental health and chronic care management (including diabetes, high blood pressure and weight loss).
Mai Hong is Senior Operations Program Manager at Teladoc, and recently offered her advice to current students interested in careers in healthcare startups, as well as health administration & management and health data, analytics and informatics (learn more about these industries here!)
Q: Can you explain what your job is? What do you do on a daily/weekly basis?
A: I’m a Senior Operations Program Manager. On a daily basis, I work with our eligibility department to make sure that we’re enrolling members. On a weekly basis, I work cross-functionally with other teams to set up clients and figure out how to scale operations as our company grows.
Q: What do you find most rewarding about your job?
A: We’re a young company so everything we do is figuring out: how are we as a company going to do this? It’s a lot of fun to create things from scratch. There are no playbooks so we can be really creative and innovative about how we approach things
Q: What do you find most challenging?
A: We’re growing very quickly so the other part of my job is to build things out that are scalable. So what we build today that works when we have 100 members, will it work tomorrow when we have 1000 members?
Q: Looking back, what were your most meaningful experiences from undergrad/grad school? (Internships, jobs, classes, student organizations, etc)
A: I participated in hackathons during grad school and it made me realize I love working in fast paced environments that come up with out-of-the-box solutions. It also helped me understand how to put together pitches that would appeal to stakeholders.
Q: What advice do you have for students looking to enter biotech/health tech/health startup worlds?
A: Ask a lot of questions! Health startups move quickly so there’s a lot of value in people that can get up to speed quickly and ask critical questions.
Interested in learning more? Check out careers at Teladoc and careers at Livongo. Learn more about careers in health care and science here!