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Day in the life of a Research Analyst
Written on Tuesday, August 22, 2023
We spoke to Linde Pronk, Research Analyst, to learn more about her role.
Tell us a bit about your work at OPEN Health.
I am a research analyst, a position I’ve held since joining OPEN Health a year and a half ago. We do a lot of different things within Modeling & Meta-Analysis: programming in R, modeling in Excel, and writing and reporting (manuscripts, reports, slide decks). Client contact is a recurring activity as well, and crucial in our work.
What aspects of your work do you enjoy the most?
I have to say that I really enjoy doing the technical work, as that is where my heart lies, but I also enjoy the writing part. The client calls are enjoyable too, because our clients are wonderful. It’s nice to be able to connect with them and discuss specifics about the projects, their needs and their desired approaches to meeting those needs.
I get a good mix of everything in my role, and I have a lot of control over that mix. You can choose to contribute to projects that particularly appeal to you, as there’s definitely room within OPEN Health to voice your interests.
How would you describe the culture at OPEN Health?
It’s lovely. My colleagues are so lovely. We are now all able to go back to the office, and I feel like everybody’s so happy to collaborate and to have a brief chat, but also to help one another out in different fields across the different Centers of Excellence. Everybody just gets along, and I really value that in our company.
How does OPEN Health foster employee growth and success?
We have a lot of resources on Bloom, our internal training platform. If you’re interested in expanding your skills in some way, there is oftentimes a training in Bloom that can support you with that. Beyond that, we have sessions that are geared towards personal development, communication, time management and change management. These trainings are really valuable to me. I feel like often we focus on technical skills while underrating social skills, yet social skills are so valuable, especially when collaborating, both internally with colleagues and externally with clients. There are also possibilities to expand your technical skills through trainings in Bloom or external subscriptions to mediums such as Datacamp.
Additionally, colleagues are a great resource. If you are stuck, there is usually somebody who has done whatever you are struggling with before, and they are more than happy to share that knowledge with you. It makes for an uplifting environment.
Finally, we have our managers and our mentors, who will discuss what your training needs are and how OPEN Health can meet them, to help you grow as a person and as an employee.
OPEN Health aims to improve patient outcomes and patient wellbeing. How do you see this action in your role at OPEN Health?
I think one of the main strengths within OPEN Health is our ability to collaborate. We offer multiple services and aid pharmaceutical companies across many different parts of the reimbursement process, giving us a holistic view that allows us to add something extra both for patients and for Pharma. Even as we’re helping our clients reach their goals, we keep the patient in mind. By supporting our clients the whole way through the process, we are maximizing our ability to impact the patient at the end of it.
What have you learned in the past year in your position?
I have learned a lot about communication and collaboration, but also technical skills as well, from the different types of projects I worked on. I don’t have a medical background, so there was a lot of factual learning that I did in relation to new indications and different products, and mediation. Additionally, I’ve had the opportunity to polish statistical skills that I had not fully explored in my studies.
But to return to what I said previously, I feel the skill of being able to collaborate with a variety of people in different roles is severely underrated in general. OPEN Health encourages collaboration, in part by making it 100% acceptable, okay and possible to be yourself. We respect one another and we really try to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable to collaborate in a way that works best for them.
We aim to deliver something that is great to our clients but while doing that we still keep an eye out for one another. I feel like everyone tries to make you feel like you belong and can thrive. OPEN Health aims to have their people flourish, and that’s something that sets us apart from other companies.
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