Avoiding Common Data Analysis Pitfalls in Health Professions Education Research

Avoiding common pitfalls when clustering biological data.

Clustering is an unsupervised learning method, which groups data points based on similarity, and is used to reveal the underlying structure of data. This computational approach is essential to understanding and visualizing the complex data that are acquired in high-throughput multidimensional biological experiments. Clustering enables researchers to make biological inferences for further experi...

Health Professions Education: Make Big Data Meaningful.

QUALITY IMPROVEMENT RESEARCH Using routine comparative data to assess the quality of health care: understanding and avoiding common pitfalls

Measuring the quality of health care has become a major concern for funders and providers of health services in recent decades. One of the ways in which quality of care is currently assessed is by taking routinely collected data and analysing them quantitatively. The use of routine data has many advantages but there are also some important pitfalls. Collating numerical data in this way means th...

Using routine comparative data to assess the quality of health care: understanding and avoiding common pitfalls.

Measuring the quality of health care has become a major concern for funders and providers of health services in recent decades. One of the ways in which quality of care is currently assessed is by taking routinely collected data and analysing them quantitatively. The use of routine data has many advantages but there are also some important pitfalls. Collating numerical data in this way means th...

Health Professions Education

February 2007 Volume 33 Number 2 One of the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report To Err Is Human was that professional societies develop a curriculum on patient safety and encourage its adoption into training. Further, it suggested that interdisciplinary team training programs be created. A second report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, furthered the argument for education refo...