Abstract
Within the healthcare setting, knowledge management would result in better addressing the patients’ needs, enabling greater efficiency in diagnosis and research activities, and improving the decision-making process. One of the main assets that could be used to ameliorate delivery of services, quality, and efficiency performance, through an analysis of data and evidence (Alsunaidi et al, 2021), is represented by use of big data, generated at hospital level, that if accordingly handled, could support the management of complex situations. The success of big data in healthcare sector, depends also on the skills, competencies and expertise of the professionals that are demanded to acquire, manage, process data and extract knowledge from them, known as Data Scientists. Due to the current lack of a dashboard of specific skills and competencies devoted to such innovative professional role, the present paper aims to structure and validate a shared framework required to cover this role in the healthcare sector, based on the scientific literature on the topic and specific needs directly derived from real practice. For the achievement of the above objective a multi-methods approach was used, with the development of a 3-stage study design. At first, an in-depth examination of potential Data Scientist skills and competencies was conducted, by reviewing literature evidence, university undergraduate and graduate international courses, and examining job postings (Stage 1). Secondly, a synthesis of the main skills and competencies was produced, with the creation of a structured framework (Stage 2). In conclusion, a specific survey was conducted by involving 125 healthcare professionals, to gather their perceptions on the relative importance of the specific skills and competencies collected in Stage 1 and in Stage 2, thus defining the main assets leveraging on the proper introduction of a Data Scientist in any healthcare organization (Stage 3). The proposed framework identified three main categories of skills and competencies (i.e. Technical ones, Business & workplace-related, Soft and other personal skills) and related items of interest. This study represents a first attempt to rationalize the fragmented body of knowledge deriving from different stream of literature on the Data Scientist topic, focusing on the healthcare sector, validating their importance and related prioritization, thus offering theoretical and practical implications.