Statistical Methods in Analysis of Healthcare Research.

Catalog description

Semester course; 3 lecture hours. 3 credits. Prerequisites: BIOS 553; ECON 612 ; and one of BIOS 625 , BIOS 631 , BIOS 646 or ECON 642 ; or permission of instructor. Exposes students to large survey and administrative databases that are commonly used in health services research. Students will learn how to organize files, protect data and link databases from multiple sources by applying state-of-the-art deterministic and probabilistic linkage methods. Students will check the quality of merged datasets and learn the advanced techniques used in handling common problems such as missing data, selection bias and handling extreme outliers. Students will also apply the statistical methods that meet the qualities of these data in order to evaluate healthcare interventions and policies. This will be a hands-on course requiring students to download and manipulate data. While the primary emphasis is not on mathematical theory, a certain amount of theoretical background may be presented for some topics.