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Hey Health Techies!

One of my favorite parts of running this platform is getting to introduce you to people working in roles that most clinicians have never even heard of.

Today's guest is one of those people.

Meet Deepashree Rajendraprasad, a dentist who now works as a Business Intelligence Developer at Carilion Clinic. If you've ever wondered who builds the dashboards executives use, creates the reports hospitals submit to CMS, or spends their day digging through Epic data to improve patient outcomes, this is the role.

We recently sat down inside the Hey Health Tech Community to talk about her journey, what her day-to-day looks like, and why she believes clinicians are uniquely positioned to succeed in this space.

Here are some of my biggest takeaways.

🦷 She didn't initially plan on becoming a developer

After practicing dentistry in India and later moving to the United States, she enrolled in Boston University's Master's in Health Informatics.

"I actually thought I'd become a Clinical Informatics Specialist," she admitted. "I wasn't passionate about programming."

Everything changed during an internship.

Because her internship focused on business intelligence and analytics, that's what employers began interviewing her for.

"I accidentally became a Business Intelligence Developer."

I loved this reflection because so many transitions happen exactly this way. You don't always map out your entire career. You follow opportunities, build new skills, and discover jobs you didn't even know existed.

📊 What does a Business Intelligence Developer actually do?

Her team supports Quality and Patient Safety for a large health system.

On any given day she might:

One thing she said made it clear why this role can be so crucial to teams: "Clinicians don't want pages of numbers. They want dashboards and visualizations they can understand quickly."

That's ultimately her job. Not just finding data, but making it useful.

💻 SQL is the skill she recommends learning first

If you've heard SQL before and immediately thought, "Programming isn't for me," you're not alone.

She felt exactly the same way. "I came from dentistry. I knew nothing about programming."

Today, SQL is the language she uses more than anything else. Her advice? Don't try to learn every programming language. Master one.

"Knowing one language really well is much more valuable than knowing five languages poorly."

She also shared something I think will encourage a lot of people: while her graduate program introduced SQL, most of her real learning came afterward through YouTube, online practice, and using it every day on the job.

🗣️ Clinicians make incredible translators

One theme kept coming up throughout our conversation: healthcare needs people who understand both medicine and technology. Her software engineering colleagues often struggle with clinical workflows. Clinicians, on the other hand, understand patient care but may not speak the language of data.

"We're the bridge between those two groups."

That bridge is becoming increasingly valuable as healthcare organizations continue investing in analytics and AI.

🤖 AI isn't replacing her—it made her dramatically faster

And since we had brought up AI, I had to ask about how it has changed her work, and her answer was validated a lot of what I have seen in roles across the industry.

She estimates reports that used to take one to two weeks can often be completed in a single day with AI helping write and troubleshoot code.

But she doesn't see AI replacing developers anytime soon.

"It still needs our input. You have to understand the data, understand healthcare, and know what you're trying to build."

Her hospital encourages employees to learn AI tools, pays for AI training, and provides a secure internal large language model so employees can safely use AI while protecting patient information.

That's very consistent with what I'm hearing across health tech right now: companies aren't looking for people who avoid AI—they're looking for people who know how to use it well.

🎯 Her advice for clinicians interested in analytics

If she could start over, here's what she'd focus on:

My biggest takeaway

As healthcare becomes more data-driven and AI becomes more deeply embedded into every workflow, it seems I’m not the only one to think that we'll continue seeing demand for clinicians who can translate between the people delivering care and the people building the technology.

If you've ever looked at healthcare analytics and thought, "I'm not technical enough," hopefully this interview gives you a little more confidence.

After all, this is someone who practiced dentistry, had never really programmed before graduate school, and now spends her days building the data infrastructure that helps improve patient care.

Sometimes the biggest barrier isn't whether you're capable, it's simply knowing these careers exist then taking consistent action to expand your skillset.

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Until next time,

Lauren

The Hey Health Tech Community is where clinicians like you come to learn, connect, and finally feel less alone in this journey — without going back to school or struggling to keep up with the headlines.

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