Spring School - Intensive Course in Effectiveness and Safety Research with Healthcare Databases

What is the aim of the course?

Large longitudinal healthcare databases have become important tools for studying the clinical effectiveness of medical products and interventions in a wide variety of care settings and for evaluating the impact of clinical programs or policy changes. This course will prepare students to design, implement, execute, and discuss studies on causal treatment effects using healthcare databases. Strengths and limitations of large longitudinal healthcare databases that are commonly used for comparative effectiveness research will be considered.

Who is the course aimed at?

The course is targeting trainees/investigators who recently started analyzing longitudinal healthcare data or are planning to do so. We specifically focus on comparative effectiveness research and will not cover data visualization, descriptive analyses or prediction. The course centers around student projects of an analyses of some medical product outcome pair and we therefore expect working knowledge of epidemiology study designs for causal inference and the typical statistical analysis methods in non-randomized settings. 

The software package is in its logic, terminology, and workflows aligned with our didactics of teaching causal study design concepts and we assume that most students will use a variety of software products after completing the course.

Where and when does the course take place?

The dates for the next Spring School in 2026 will soon be announced here.

Further information is provided in the course flyer.