Evaluation in Healthcare Settings

This course is the fourth Population Health course. Its goal is to continue exploring population health and its importance for medicine, building from prior theory and practice, and methods courses. The focus of this course will be to discuss how population health and primary care intersect in the health care setting, and for students to explore how social and economic factors that predict health and disease patterns may also predict patterns of health services, and how access to health services influences health outcomes and population health statistics. The course is developed to provide students with an opportunity to expand and practice analytic epidemiology/biostatistics skills by completing a health services research project in small student groups. Data analysis skills that will be introduced include regression and survival models. Projects will be developed in concert with community health center leadership that will allow students to practice developing research questions, collecting/compiling data, analyzing and interpreting data, and presenting results. Simultaneously, the students will experience acting as part of a clinical team to use population health and epidemiology skills to address questions related to health care access and delivery. Students will expand on their SPSS skills as well.