In this post I describe how I would go about using health analytics to identify patients most at risk of an opioid overdose. The Facts In 2016, there were 42,249 deaths in the US that involved opioids. That equates to a 13.3/100,000 mortality rate, and approx. one opioid related death every 10 minutes! By the time … Continue reading On Opioids and Analytics
Category: analytic methods
An intro to SQL – your key to databases
In this post, I show you the core SQL commands that will address a lot of the data management work you will do as a health data analyst. If you work with data in a large organization that has lots of it, you probably use SQL. Put another way, knowing SQL will open the door … Continue reading An intro to SQL – your key to databases
Decision Trees – intro
As mentioned before, I'm not a fan of using advanced analytic techniques for the sake of intellectual pursuits. I'm a HUGE fan of asking good questions, framing analysis well, knowing data well, quickly arriving at actionable insights. A trained data scientist's toolbox has many statistical techniques, each of which has strengths and weaknesses. A health … Continue reading Decision Trees – intro
Confessions of health data -2
In a previous post, I described how to format typical physician productivity data to enable further analyses, finding useful insight. I dig deeper to find more actionable insights in this post. Refresher: we had office visit data for 3 doctors over 2 month period; we added RVUs to the office visit procedure codes; we added … Continue reading Confessions of health data -2
Just the Statistics you need
In this post, I describe the statistical concepts that I have found most relevant in health data analytics. First and foremost, I’m not a fan of using advanced statistical techniques for the sake of using them. In healthcare, the audience of your analysis is often non-statisticians (bio statistics research arena aside), so advanced statistical concepts … Continue reading Just the Statistics you need



