School of Information 624

Step into the role of a data consultant and use data to facilitate change in healthcare research, quality improvement and patient outcomes, and population health. Data consultants act as the bridge between the leadership and project stakeholders, and the data analysts to help in translating the data into actionable results. Their expertise lies in effective communication, scoping of projects, and needs assessment. They examine data, processes and technologies to evaluate current state and critical problems. This course is divided into 3 units, each focusing on the use of Health Informatics in different environments. Utilizing real and simulated projects with real anonymized data, students will navigate technical problems at the level of a Research project, a Quality Improvement initiative, and a wide-spread Population issue. Each unit will take between 1 and 3 real world scenarios and put the data in the students' hands. For each example project, a stakeholder will present their business objective. Students will then have the opportunity to conduct an informational interview, and they will then have to figure out the operational issues with the request, scope the project, explore and evaluate the datasets, and effectively use the data to answer research questions. Students will learn how to handle outliers based on organizational research needs as well as how to organize and present the data to the stakeholders. At the end of each unit, students will turn in a technical report of their analyses, including visualizations for effective reporting.