(Note: This is a full credit version of Bus 40912.)
One of the significant challenges in conducting research using healthcare data is that due to HIPAA regulations, researchers cannot learn about, explore, and experiment with patient level data without a Data Use Agreement, purchasing the data, and ingesting the data into a secure computing environment. This a time consuming and expensive process, and thus poses a substantial barrier to initiating research in this space.
In this course, Ph.D. students will work with national claims data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS), using the CMS Limited Data Set housed at Booth for instructional purposes. Students will receive instruction on using and interpreting this data, and will conduct a major project to replicate a published study or complete a proposed project of their own. After completing this course, students will be well-prepared to conduct research using national claims data.
NEW FOR FALL 2026: Using a special HIPAA-compliant LLM, students will learn how to use AI to analyze healthcare data.
Ph.D. students only: strict.
- PhD - students only
- Application-based course
Class slides, research articles, videos. All work will be conducted on a secure Virtual Machine (VM). You will also learn to use Data Science Studio (DSS) from Dataiku.
Project
Final Presentation
All work is to be done individually.
Description and/or course criteria last updated: July 14 2026
