HSEG 655 Medical Devices and Integrated Systems

3 semester hours

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Triple Aim calls for the best care for the whole population at the lowest cost. The challenge is to bring classic health services research and population health research together in a meaningful way. The Affordable Care Act and the creation of Accountable Care Organizations have shifted reimbursement from a fee-based to a value-based model. The incentives are changing from the treatment of the sick to the promotion of health and management of chronic conditions. Big data analytics and the emergence of the data science profession are allowing purchasers and providers of care to examine large data sets to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful business information. The course explores the opportunities for healthcare analytics and clinical treatment developments. The course will cover the research lifecycle from formulation of clinical questions, to big data access and extraction, statistical analysis, evidence formulation, and clinical implementation methods. Statistical topics will include: Hadoop clustering, structured vs. unstructured data, data quality and consistency, extrapolation, scaling, dimensionality, supervised and unsupervised learning, decision trees, handling uncertainty, Bayesian methods, Hidden Markov models, model selection, validation, data visualization, and support vector machines. The role of Healthcare Systems Engineers and data scientists in such projects will be explored. This course is taught online.