Interviewing for a health consultant role can be intimidating You’ll likely face a rigorous set of behavioral, situational, and industry-specific questions aimed at assessing your qualifications
You can go into each interview with confidence, show off your skills, and get the health consulting job of your dreams if you prepare well.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to crush your next health consultant interview, including:
- An overview of common health consultant interview questions
- Tips for crafting winning responses
- Examples and templates to guide your interview prep
Common Health Consultant Interview Questions
Health consultant interviews typically feature a mix of traditional interview questions along with industry-specific inquiries Here’s a sneak peek at some of the most popular questions you’re likely to encounter
General Interview Questions
- Tell me about yourself.
- Walk me through your resume.
- Why do you want to work here?
- What can you offer this company?
- How does your experience make you a fit for this role?
Industry-Specific Questions
- Why do you want to be a health consultant?
- What healthcare industry trends excite you?
- How do you stay up-to-date on healthcare regulations?
- Describe a time you spotted a trend before your competitors.
- How would you evaluate the needs of a new healthcare client?
Behavioral Questions
- Tell me about a time you successfully led a healthcare project.
- Describe a situation where you persuaded a client to follow your recommendation over a competitor’s.
- Share an example of how you simplified a complex healthcare issue for a client.
Case Study Questions
- How would you create a market entry strategy for a new healthcare technology startup?
- Our client is facing decreased patient satisfaction scores. How would you help improve their scores?
- Imagine you are consulting a hospital network. How would you help them reduce readmission rates?
This mix of questions is designed to assess your healthcare industry expertise, consulting capabilities, communication skills, and ability to think on your feet.
Next, let’s look at some best practices for crafting winning responses.
How to Craft Winning Responses
You can easily impress interviewers by following a few simple best practices when responding:
1. Structure your responses using the STAR method.
STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Introduce the situation, explain the task or challenge, detail the actions you took, and close with the positive result. This method will help you provide concise, compelling responses.
2. Draw on specific examples and metrics.
Back up your responses with real examples. Provide key details on the companies, stakeholders, and metrics involved. Quantify your achievements with numbers whenever possible.
3. Tailor your responses to the role.
Thoroughly review the job description and highlight experiences that make you an ideal fit for the company and position. Make it clear through your responses that you understand their needs.
4. Focus on the positive.
Even when discussing challenges, put a positive spin on the outcome. Demonstrate humility, but don’t highlight your weaknesses or dwell on mistakes.
5. Practice aloud until responses flow naturally.
Simply reviewing answers in your head isn’t enough. Practice out loud to polish your responses. Ask a friend to conduct a mock interview.
Let’s look at examples of winning responses to common questions.
Examples of Strong Responses
Here are examples of compelling responses to some of the most frequently asked health consultant interview questions:
Interviewer: Tell me about yourself.
You: As a healthcare consultant with over seven years of experience, I specialize in helping hospitals implement electronic health record systems. I most recently led an EHR implementation at Baptist Health that resulted in a 50% increase in clinician efficiency within five months. I’m passionate about leveraging healthcare technology to drive better patient outcomes.
Interviewer: Why do you want to be a health consultant?
You: What initially attracted me to healthcare consulting was the opportunity to innovate. I love deconstructing complex issues to identify solutions. For example, during a recent project for a surgical center, I conducted an in-depth analysis of their workflows and staffing model. I noticed that nurses were spending 20% of their time on administrative tasks. My team developed a customized digital solution that automated these tasks, freeing up nurses to spend more time with patients. The center’s patient satisfaction scores increased by 25% as a result. I want to bring this type of innovative thinking to new healthcare clients.
Interviewer: Tell me about a time you successfully persuaded a client to follow your recommendation.
You: As a consultant for ABC Hospital, my team was tasked with assessing their emergency department workflows. Our analysis showed lengthy wait times and patients leaving before being seen due to extended delays. I recommended a digital check-in system, nurse triage program, and results-pending model to decrease walkouts and improve efficiency. The client was initially resistant to such an overhaul of processes. To persuade them, I used data modeling to demonstrate how these changes could decrease wait times by 40%. I also quantified the revenue impact of decreased walkouts. In the end, the client approved our complete proposal, and it led to a $2.5 million increase in revenue in the first year of implementation.
Tips for Last Minute Preparation
The final 24 hours before your health consultant interview provides prime prep time. Here are some last minute tips:
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Review the company website – Search for details on current projects, clients, mission statement, and recent news.
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Re-read the job description – Ensure you understand the role’s core objectives and requirements.
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Practice aloud – Spend at least one hour rehearsing your responses out loud. Have a friend conduct a mock interview.
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Research your interviewers – Connect with them on LinkedIn and review their backgrounds.
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Get a good night’s sleep – Being well-rested will help you remain focused and quick on your feet.
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Review common questions and your responses – Refresh these right before the interview when they’ll be top of mind.
Thorough preparation and rehearsal will help you walk into the interview room feeling ready to succeed. With the right healthcare consulting interview answers, you can emphasize the unique value you bring to the table.
Sample STAR Stories for Common Questions
Here are several sample STAR stories you can use as a starting point when crafting your own winning responses:
Q: Tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult client.
Situation: I was consulting for a specialty surgery clinic that was facing declining revenue. The CEO initially insisted their issues stemmed from insurance reimbursement rates.
Task: My job was to perform a comprehensive analysis to identify the true factors impacting their revenue.
Action: I conducted interviews with over 20 physicians and administrators to better understand their workflows. This revealed inefficiencies in surgical scheduling and bottlenecks with intake processes, which lengthened wait times. I presented my findings to the CEO along with my recommendations.
Result: The CEO ultimately agreed to implement my recommended solutions, which optimized surgical schedules and streamlined intake processes. These changes allowed them to double their daily surgical volume and increase revenue by 30% over three months.
Q: Tell me about a time you successfully simplified a complex issue.
Situation: I was working with the leadership of a midsized hospital struggling with high clinician burnout rates. Many complex factors were at play, from understaffing to outdated technology.
Task: My job was to identify and prioritize the key drivers of clinician burnout.
Action: I conducted one-on-one interviews with doctors, nurses, and other providers to understand their daily challenges. This revealed that outdated EHR systems caused the most frustration by slowing down workflows. I presented this data to hospital leadership along with a prioritized action plan for implementing a new cloud-based EHR system.
Result: The hospital followed my recommendation, and clinician burnout decreased by 15% within seven months of implementing the updated EHR system.
Q: How would you evaluate the needs of a new healthcare client?
Situation: When starting work with a new healthcare client, I aim to develop a comprehensive understanding of their needs and pain points.
Task: My first objective is to identify their challenges, goals, and desired outcomes.
Actions: I typically start by conducting stakeholder interviews with individuals across departments to understand diverse perspectives. I also gather relevant data on workflows, technologies used, patient metrics, and financial performance. Next, I analyze this information to identify root causes and areas for improvement. I prioritize solutions based on potential business impact and effort required.
Result: This process of gathering data from multiple sources allows me to provide an accurate assessment of the client’s needs. I can then make informed recommendations on the solutions that will deliver maximum value.
Preparing go-to stories based on the STAR method will help you respond quickly and confidently when behavioral or situational questions get thrown your way.
How to Handle Curveballs and Tough Questions
Occasionally, health consultant interviews take surprising turns. Here’s a game plan for handling two common curveballs:
The overly technical question:
The 7 Steps to Solve Any Healthcare Consulting Case
Follow these seven steps to solve any healthcare consulting case interview.
1. Understand the case background information
The case interview will start with the interviewer explaining the case background information. Make sure that you are taking notes while the interviewer is speaking. You’ll want to focus specifically on understanding the context, the company, and the objective of the case.
Take the time to understand the business issue and goal of the case. This is the most important part of the case interview. Addressing the wrong business problem is the quickest way to fail a case interview.
2. Ask clarifying questions
Once the interviewer has finished giving you the case information, you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions.
Even though you can ask any question, it’s best to ask ones that will help you understand the situation and problem better. You want to avoid asking questions that are too specific or not relevant to understanding the case situation.
Most candidates ask between one to three questions. You’ll be able to ask more questions later in the case interview if you need to.
3. Summarize the information and verify the objective
After you’re done asking your immediate questions, make a list of all the important case details and make sure you understand the goal correctly.
In this step, many candidates make the mistake of stating every fact of the case verbatim. Instead, you should summarize the case concisely and clearly in your own words. This demonstrates that you can synthesize information effectively.
4. Develop a framework
The next step is to structure a framework to help guide you through the case.
A case interview framework is a tool that helps you organize and separate a complicated issue into more manageable parts. Think of a framework as brainstorming different ideas and organizing them into different categories.
In order to make a framework, you should ask yourself what three or four big questions you need to answer before you can make a recommendation.
Many candidates make the mistake of using memorized frameworks and applying them to their case interviews. Interviewers can tell if you are using a framework that you have learned by heart because not all of its parts will apply to the case.
Using a framework that you have memorized makes you look bad because it means you can’t think critically for yourself. Therefore, practice creating unique and tailored frameworks for each case that you get.
If you want to learn how to make frameworks that are specific to each case, read our article on case interview frameworks.
You can ask the interviewer for a few minutes of silence to gather your thoughts while you’re making your framework. Afterwards, present your framework to the interviewer.
5. Kick off the case
The interviewer may agree with your approach or give you feedback or suggestions after you’re done with your framework. Afterwards, it is time to start solving the case.
How the case investigation will start depends on whether your case is a candidate-led or interviewer-led case. Most cases are candidate-led.
Candidate-led case: In this type of case, you will be expected to drive the direction of the case. You will tell them what areas to look into, what tests to run, and what the next step should be. So, pick an area of your framework to start analyzing. It doesn’t matter which area you choose as long as it helps solve the case.
Interviewer-led case: In this type of case, the interviewer will be leading the direction of the case. They will be asking you specific questions that you will answer. After each question, they’ll direct you to the next question. When you finish giving your framework in an interviewer-led case, the interviewer will usually ask you a question to start the case.
6. Answer quantitative and qualitative questions
The majority of the interview will be spent answering a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions.
For quantitative questions, you might have to guess how big a market is, do some math to figure out how profitable something is, or figure out what different charts and graphs mean.
Before you start doing any math to solve a quantitative problem, make sure you walk the interviewer through your plan. As you do the math, be sure to talk out loud about each step so that the interviewer can easily follow along.
You might be asked to come up with possible ideas or to give your opinion on an open-ended business question in a qualitative question. When answering these questions, try to structure your answer as much as possible.
At the end of each question, you should make sure that your answer relates to the main goal of the case. How does your answer help you solve the case? How does your answer impact your potential recommendation?.
7. Deliver a recommendation
At the end of the case, the interviewer will ask you to prepare an overall recommendation. It is okay to ask the interviewer to look over your notes for a moment before you give your advice.
Based on the quantitative and qualitative questions you have answered, what recommendation do they collectively support?
Structure your recommendation in the following way:
- Provide the two to three reasons that support your recommendation
- Write down the next steps you would take if you had more time.
After you deliver your recommendation, the interviewer will conclude the case interview. The interviewer may talk about what really happened in the case if it was based on a real-life project.
Don’t worry if your recommendation does not match what actually happened during the project. For case interviews, you are not assessed on your answer, but on your process.
Healthcare Consulting Practice Cases
Below are eight healthcare consulting cases that you can use to practice your case interview skills.
- McKinsey pharmaceutical practice case: This is an acquisition case about whether a big drug company should buy a small start-up.
- This is a pricing case from BCG that is meant to help a drug company figure out the best price for a new drug (see video below).
- ClearView pharmaceutical case: This is a market sizing case where the goal is to help a pharmaceutical company figure out if it can reach its sales goal for a diabetes inhaled insulin product.
- ClearView biotechnology case: This is a quantitative case where you help a biotechnology company evaluate its new treatments for acute myeloid leukemia.
- For the LEK medical consumables case, the goal is to find out how big the market is for medical supplies bought by general practitioners in the UK.
- This is a market entry case about the biotechnology company Health Advances. Its goal is to help the company understand the market opportunity for developing a new drug that stops ear infections.
Here are videos that show you how we would solve the McKinsey pharmaceutical case and the BCG drug pricing case, taking you step by step. The McKinsey case is an interviewer-led case while the BCG case is a candidate-led case. There are two videos that you can watch to get an idea of what these two types of case interviews are like.
Make sure you follow the seven steps we gave you for how to do well in healthcare consulting case interviews when you work on the rest of these cases.
Essential Healthcare Industry Knowledge You Should Know
The healthcare industry is a massive and complex industry. It can be broken down into the following four major sectors:
- Drugs: These are businesses that make new medicines, medical tools, and ways to treat illnesses. Some big companies are Johnson
- Medical equipment: These are the businesses that make medical tools like scalpels, forceps, gloves, and high-tech tools like MRI machines and surgical robots. Major companies include Stryker and Medtronic.
- Managed Healthcare: These companies provide health insurance policies. Major companies include UnitedHealth, Anthem, Aetna, Humana, and Cigna.
- Healthcare Facilities: These businesses run nursing homes, hospitals, labs, clinics, and psychiatric hospitals. Major companies include Lab Corp and HCA Healthcare.
There are various types of stakeholders that participate in the healthcare industry. You should be familiar with each of these stakeholders and how they interact with each other:
- Patients: those that seek medical attention or care
- Providers: physicians that see and treat patients
- Payers are insurance companies that sell health insurance plans to people directly or through employers or the government.
- Pharmaceutical firms: companies that develop and market drugs and medications
- Government: systems that set healthcare policies and regulations
There has been a massive amount of innovation happening in the healthcare industry. You should be familiar with the biggest trends, such as:
- Growth of telehealth, which is the use of phone technologies, like videoconferencing, to help with long-distance or remote healthcare
- Growth in the development of biosimilars: biosimilars are biological products that are made to look like a drug that has already been approved. They help people lower their health care costs without lowering the quality of care.
- Change from inpatient to outpatient settings: Health systems are still moving procedures that used to be done in hospitals to outpatient settings like retail clinics, community health centers, and even people’s homes.
- If healthcare services are priced based on how well they work or what results they produce for patients instead of a flat fee, this is called value-based pricing.
- Utilizing cutting edge tech like AI, NLP, and the Internet of Things to improve the delivery of health care services is known as digital transformation.
