Short Courses

Introduction to the Use of Electronic Medical Records (EHR) Data for Health Technology Assessment (HTA)

Session Dates: July 13-14, 2022, virtual

Details and Registration

Electronic health records (EHRs) are increasingly available for health economics and outcomes research yet are unfamiliar to many researchers and analysts. This introductory course will focus on principles for understanding the EHR and how it may be used for research and inform Health Technology Assessments.  

Co-Instructors

Scott Ramsey, MD, PhD
Director, Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research
& Professor, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
Seattle, WA, USA

Shrujal Baxi, MD, MPH
Senior Vice President Clinical Science 
Verana Health
San Francisco, CA, USA 

Tools for Reproducible Real-World Data (RWD) Analyses

Course content and exercises

Past sessions: May 28, 2022 at University of York; May 24-25, 2021 virtual; Nov 2, 2019 in Copenhagen; May 18, 2018 in New Orleans; Nov 7, 2018 in Barcelona

This course focuses on the concepts and tools of reproducible research and reporting of modern data analyses. The need for more reproducible tools in health economics and outcomes research is growing rapidly as analyses of real world data become more frequent, involve larger datasets, and employ more complex computations.

We cover the principles of structuring and organizing a modern data analysis, literate statistical analysis tools, formal version control, software testing and debugging, and developing reproducible reports. Numerous real-world examples and an interactive class exercises reinforce the concepts and tools introduced. RStudio Cloud is used for exercises. Participants who wish to gain hands-on experience should bring their laptops.

Concepts

  1. What is reproducible research?
  2. Why is reproducibility so important?
  3. How do we get there?
    • Sharing code & findings
    • Writing clear code
    • Organizing data
    • Catching mistakes

Course Materials

The materials for in-class exercises and examples are here (the password is provided to registered students). The dataset used for teaching is a simple dummy version of electronic health records (EHR)-derived data for a set of cancer patients receiving treatment. The R code for analysis exercises is available on GitHub.

Supplemental Resources

coding style & culture

learning R

reproducible research