Spent 3+ years in the healthcare coverage group at a BB in NY. Would rather speak less about current / future aspirations and more about investment banking and healthcare, but please do ask away and I will answer as best I can.
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I really enjoyed working in healthcare -- given the complexities within each one of the three principal verticals (pharma, medtech, services), there's a lot to learn and even after my analyst program, I felt like there was a ton left more for me to learn.
One aspect in particular about pharma that I enjoyed is that the managers of the businesses seemingly act more like owners of a collection of assets, and as a result, there are very interesting transaction structures that are explored. I've worked on several interesting transaction structures including JVs (with a spectrum of financial, tax and governance consequences), royalty deals, assets swaps, spin-offs, etc. Even on pitches that were seemingly going nowhere, it's always very interesting thinking about how to inherently structure assets within a universe of pharma companies, vs. throwing two companies together to get a +5% accretion number.
A science background may be helpful, but there are only a handful of folks in the group have any science background. I don't think it helps very much outside of expressing interest. Clients hire us to provide valuation and capital markets expertise. On the pharma side, companies typically don't need help designing clinical trials on the pharma front, and on the medtech / services side, you're generally dealing with folks without a science background as well.
In terms of challenges for healthcare, I'm probably not the right person to ask given that I was just a lowly analyst, but there are a lot of fundamental business model changes and questions that have the industry in flux -- hospitals can't effectively make capex decisions without visibility on AHCA, drug pricing is still up in the air and some spec pharma companies that are levered and historically relied on price inflation are facing material challenges as a result, no one really knows whether PBMs hurt or help clients, etc. etc. Lots of evolving profit pools. All around, a ton going on.
This is purely anecdotal and based on activity I've observed, but believe the strongest groups are your usual suspects -- I've seen a lot of recent pharma activity from GS and Centerview. MS / CS have both historically been strong in healthcare services (MS has a couple of very quality healthcare service MDs and CS has a strong balance sheet / sponsor relationships -- sponsors are very active in services). I was on a few co-advisory mandates with BAML and believe their bench also runs deep (a lot of senior MDs). Can't speak to dealflow, but JPM has a massive healthcare team (believe the largest on the street).
For MM, RBC is surprisingly strong and has been hiring actively lately (at the senior levels) with very attractive comp packages. At my BB, we would bake off quite a bit for $1bn sell sides and I think Jefferies would win the majority of mandates. They've just crafted out the $300mm-$700mm sell side space. I've also heard Houlihan crushes healthcare services (very strong in sell sides). Unfortunately don't have much visibility on the other folks, but I don't believe they are anywhere near as active as RBC / Jefferies / Houlihan.
Unfortunately I don't have more concrete views and again, the above is purely anecdotal. I'm sure some freshman is itching to throw healthcare league tables around.
In terms of following the industry, fierce pharma (wso won't let me post the link) is the only healthcare focused website / blog I know of -- I've been looking for more, but I think the resources we all know of (WSJ, Bloomberg, etc.) do a great job of covering the sector. As far as I know, there isn't much in the way of healthcare blogs like there is in TMT (The Verge, Engadget, etc.), but I would love if someone could prove me wrong (as I've been looking for a few for a while).