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Healthcare jobs you might not know about: as career fields go, healthcare is hot. And there are lots of cool jobs, including some that aren't as well known. Find out about three of them here.

Article Excerpt
Healthcare careers provide the chance to help people, do interesting technical work, and earn relatively high salaries. But that s not all. The healthcare industry also offers some of the best employment opportunities in the economy.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), wage and salary employment in the healthcare industry is projected to grow 22 percent between 2006 and 2016. That translates into about 3 million new jobs--nearly 20 percent of the total number of jobs expected to be added to the economy over the projections decade.

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Of the dozens of different healthcare occupations, however, many people are familiar with only a few, such as nurse, doctor, and physical therapist. This article takes a look at some healthcare careers you might not know about. The first section describes the job duties, wages and employment, and qualifications and training requirements for each of three occupations: biostatisticians, cytotechnologists, and surgical technologists. The second section describes some pros and cons associated with these jobs. Suggestions for finding more information appear at the end.

Healthcare jobs to learn about

Healthcare careers have varying tasks, take-home pay, and training requirements. Some occupations are highly visible and involve direct patient care. Others aren't as well known and require little or no contact with patients. Regardless of how different the occupations are, however, workers in these careers usually share a concern for patient health.

Biostatisticians

If you like working with numbers and want to work in healthcare, you might want to be a biostatistician. Biostatisticians apply statistics to medical and public-health research.

Almost daily, the media report new research findings related to human health. Maybe an experimental treatment for HIV has been found to work better than current therapies. New data might reinforce the link between high blood pressure and heart disease. Or perhaps a report reveals dangers in treatment options, such as the risk in using smoking cessation drugs. Health-related findings such as these, or others concerning healthcare costs and quality, are usually based on the work of biostatisticians.

Job duties. Biostatisticians design statistical studies, decide how to gather data, and analyze the data. To help a hospital measure the incidence and cause of secondary infections among patients, for example, biostatisticians would first determine the required sample size (the number of patients from which data must be collected for the results to be statistically sound).

Then, biostatisticians must decide how to collect the data--from patients, patient records, or hospital staff--and they also might help to determine the types of questions to ask and the method to use in asking them. Designed one way, for example, the study might require telephoning patients for follow-up; designed another way, it might require drawing patients' blood to track a physical effect.

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In addition, biostatisticians analyze the data that they or others have collected. They decide which calculations to do and use statistical programming software to turn raw data into usable statistics. Often, biostatisticians work closely with other experts, such as medical professionals or health policy analysts.

Each study that biostatisticians...

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