user2016

Over the past six or seven years, the healthcare industry has been transformed through a broad shift away from paper-based workflows to electronic ones. This new electronic infrastructure has enabled the collection of vast amounts of clinical and financial data. Problematically, the ability to analyze such data and convert it into meaningful insights capable of driving continuous improvements has not kept pace with the speed of data acquisition.nnWith healthcare costs continuing to grow, national policy changes have recently placed a new mandate for healthcare providers to leverage data to reign in expenses. R, which has been honed and developed across a number of industries prior to healthcare, has proven to be an invaluable tool in addressing this challenge. The integrated data manipulation capabilities, focus on exploratory data analysis and deep integration with broader data analysis pipelines, including final end-user analytics and visualizations, have proven invaluable.nnThis presentation will highlight the growing role of R in healthcare analytics. Specifically, it will focus on:n* R's role in rapid data exploration, facilitated through R-Markdown, particularly around data sets where the exact questions are still being formulatedn* R's role in end-user-ready visualizations, with a focus on the ggplot packagen* R's role in crafting an explanatory narrative around investigatory analysis