Projects: Healthcare Management Analytics Lab

As made evident by the ongoing opioid abuse crisis in America, managing pain is a challenging prospect. From a hospital’s perspective, pain impedes recovery after treatment, so it must be managed well. However, the wrong pain management system can lead to worse pain in the future and drug dependence and abuse. The goal of this project is to create statistical models that can preemptively identify hospital patients who have a higher risk of negative pain outcomes and the causal effect of various treatments on these patients. You will use extensive data from the University of Chicago Hospitals on surgical and emergency department patients, and report your results to hospital executives. Anyone with an interest in public health or healthcare data, and an interest in using statistics to improve healthcare will be a good fit for this team. In doing this project you will learn how to translate statistical insights into executive action, become familiar with healthcare data generally, and specifically become involved in improving the pain management process — including the use (and abuse) of opioids.