Big Data Analytics in Healthcare: Value, Effectiveness and Safety

Large longitudinal healthcare databases have become important tools for studying the utilization patterns and clinical effectiveness of medical products and interventions in a wide variety of care settings. This course will prepare students to identify and use longitudinal databases for their own research. Strengths and limitations of large longitudinal healthcare databases that are commonly used for research will be considered. Special attention will be devoted to nationally representative databases that are critical for comparative effectiveness research. The course focuses on analytic principles and their application to database research. Participants will learn through lectures by experienced faculty and by evaluating published database studies. In computer labs they will learn to implement a database study comparing two medical products in a large healthcare claims database. The project will be conducted using the Aetion platform with an intuitive user interface that does not require any programming skills. The course requires a working understanding of epidemiologic study designs and typical analysis strategies. The target audience consists of researchers working in academia, medical product industry, health plans, government institutions, regulatory agencies, who have access to large longitudinal healthcare databases. They may use such data to evaluate the effectiveness of medical interventions and care patterns, to understand the comparative effectiveness and safety of medical products (drugs, devices), to test the impact of coverage policy changes, or to monitor the outcome of risk-sharing arrangements. * This course can also be taken in its second part only, starting from Thursday (please contact us for details) You may also register for this course through the Eu2P program. This enables you to be awarded with a Eu2P academic certificate diploma bearing 3 ECTS credits.

Course leader

Sebastian Schneeweiss & Krista Huybrechts (Harvard School of Public Health)

Target group

The target audience consists of researchers working in academia, medical product industry, health plans, government institutions, regulatory agencies, who have access to large longitudinal healthcare databases.

Course aim

This course will prepare students to identify and use longitudinal databases for their own research. Special attention will be devoted to nationally representative databases that are critical for comparative effectiveness research.