Introduction to Healthcare Database Research

3 credits · Graduate School

The goals of the course are to provide students with foundational knowledge for using administrative health care claims data and other sources of relational data for health policy, health economics, and health services research. Students will learn how to manage large databases in SAS, how to identify key variables in administrative data and how to design and implement a study protocol. At the end of the course student should be able to create an analytic dataset consisting of a study population of interest and measures for key variables needed to address a specific research question. Students will gain an understanding of how and why administrative data are collected, how diseases and treatments are identified in the data and the strengths and limitations of using administrative data for health policy, health economics, and health services research. This course will consist of a lecture and lab format. [3]