(Casual) Data Science for Doctors

Doctors who like statistics are a very rare breed. It’s a topic of horror for most in post-graduate exams, and the most we tend to use it in day to day life is through utterly misunderstanding the p-value and drawing useless pie charts on posters. But it really doesn’t have to be this way.

Healthcare is full of data, from the field-defining randomised controlled trial through to the mandatory yearly audit through to the humble ward jobs list. Manipulating, drawing inferences from, understanding, and visualising this data should be a core part of our jobs, but is shrouded in a mystique that it really doesn’t deserve but which scares doctors away. So I’m hoping here to present a roadmap that health professionals can take to get on board the data-driven evidence train and use data science in their everyday work.