The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has created a new source of big data namely, the record of routine clinical practice as a by-product of care. This graduate class will teach you how to use EHRs and other patient data to discover new clinical knowledge and improve healthcare. Upon completing this course, you should be able to: differentiate between and give examples of categories of research questions and the study designs used to address them, describe common healthcare data sources and their relative advantages and limitations, extract and transform various kinds of clinical data to create analysis-ready datasets, design and execute an analysis of a clinical dataset based on your familiarity with the workings, applicability, and limitations of common statistical methods, evaluate and criticize published research using your knowledge of 1-4 to generate new research ideas and separate hype from reality. Prerequisites: CS 106A or equivalent, STATS BMDS 60 or equivalent. Recommended: STATS BMDS 216, CS 145, STATS 305NOTE: For students in the Department of Biomedical Data Science Program, this core course MUST be taken as a letter grade only.
3 units · Medical Option (Med-Ltr-CR/NC)
The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has created a new source of big data namely, the record of routine clinical practice as a by-product of care. This graduate class will teach you how to use EHRs and other patient data to discover new clinical knowledge and improve healthcare. Upon completing this course, you should be able to: differentiate between and give examples of categories of research questions and the study designs used to address them, describe common healthcare data sources and their relative advantages and limitations, extract and transform various kinds of clinical data to create analysis-ready datasets, design and execute an analysis of a clinical dataset based on your familiarity with the workings, applicability, and limitations of common statistical methods, evaluate and criticize published research using your knowledge of 1-4 to generate new research ideas and separate hype from reality. Prerequisites: CS 106A or equivalent, STATS 60 or equivalent. Recommended: STATS 216, CS 145, STATS 305NOTE: For students in the Department of Biomedical Data Science Program, this core course MUST be taken as a letter grade only.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.