Purdue launches new professional development online course: Data Science for Healthcare Professionals 

Purdue University is launching a new online, professional development course that covers utilizing data in health care contexts. Data Science for Healthcare Professionals is a flexible, self-paced online course designed for working clinicians, hospital staff, pharmacy workers, public health officials, sales associates and other professionals who want to learn how to work with the large amounts of data generated in the health care industry.  

Data plays a critical role in the health care industry — health care organizations generate vast amounts of data in their daily operations, and that data is used to generate actionable insights about patient care, forward medical research and create organizational improvements. Health care professionals in a variety of roles can benefit from understanding data science, and Purdue’s Data Science for Healthcare Professionals course aims to help learners improve their data literacy in a convenient, streamlined format. 

“The provision of modern health care generates staggering volumes of information that have now long surpassed the capability of humans alone to gather, assess, and make sense of,” said Kyle Hultgren, clinical assistant professor of pharmacy practice in Purdue University’s College of Pharmacy. “Data science is crucial for storing, accessing, and converting this data into actionable insights that can improve patient outcomes and how we consume health care today.” 

Through completing four modules, students in the course will learn how to identify various applications and settings where datasets are being utilized in health care, describe how data science is applied in health care, manipulate large data sets to make logical conclusions, analyze ethical and regulatory issues related to data in health care, and improve their skills in data analysis.  

Students in the course also complete a capstone project that teaches them how to apply real-world health care data in practical contexts. By working with a variety of data and generating strategies for understanding, analyzing and applying that data, students are given a broad base of data skills that can be used in many different roles and organizations.  

“This course uses real-world, very large healthcare datasets as a training ground to extract meaningful insights from complex information,” said Hultgren. “Working directly with authentic data, participants learn to apply various analytical methods and techniques to solve practical problems as well as consider ethical implications of these conclusions.” 

Some basic knowledge of Python and programming fundamentals is required to enroll in this course. Students who are unfamiliar with programming are encouraged to take Purdue’s Data Science Primer course prior to enrolling.  

To learn more about this course and register, visit the course’s webpage.