Course details

HS 807 - Management and Analysis of Large US Health Data

Prerequisite: Graduate statistics course or instructor permission

Credits: 4

This course will provide students with a general overview of the principles, concepts, and methods of data management and analysis of large sources of national health data. This is a "doing" course and students will be guided through a collection of exercises designed to provide hands-on experience with a focus on leveraging publicly available data to answer health-related questions. Specific data sources covered in this course include: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES); the Area Health Resource File; the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER) Cancer Registry; the National Ambulatory, Medical Care Survey (NAMCS and NHAMCS); and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). Students will become proficient at data management (importing/exporting, cleaning, and combining data files), analysis (basic descriptive measures and applied regression), and designing an analytic workflow in order to examine a relationship between an exposure and health outcome. Students will also be introduced to complex survey design methods, common approaches to building statistical models, and methods of risk adjustment.