Healthcare Data Processing and Management

Effective processing and management of healthcare data supports better patient care, more efficient operations, and stronger research and decision-making.
This course introduces key concepts, tools, and practical approaches for working with healthcare data across multiple medical domains.

Course goals

The goal of the course is to build a solid foundation in healthcare data structures, standards, and storage, paired with practical skills in processing, analysis, and ethical data management.

• Understand healthcare data structures, existing standards, data acquisition, and healthcare-specific storage needs.
• Learn fundamentals of human anatomy and common pathologies, linking medical concepts to data types via cases.
• Develop practical skills to process and analyse textual, numerical, categorical, and visual medical data using existing tools.
• Learn to prepare data for research and analysis, including legal and ethical aspects of healthcare data use.
• Strengthen communication and teamwork through a group project focused on preparing healthcare data for research.

Learning outcomes

• Explain healthcare data structures, standards, and storage methods, including where they apply and their limitations.
• Process and analyse multiple healthcare data types using current tools/software, extracting meaningful insights.
• Prepare and manage healthcare data for research responsibly (legal/ethical compliance) and work effectively in teams.

Main topics

• Healthcare data overview across domains (textual, numerical, categorical, imaging, signals, genomic) and how these data are used in care, public health, and research.
• Research Ethics Committee and legal framework: access, sharing, anonymization, and secondary use of medical data.
• Medical data processing software and open databases, including responsible dataset selection and reuse.
• Diagnostic data pipelines: visual/invasive methods, electrophysiological signals (e.g., ECG/EEG), molecular/genetic diagnostics, lab diagnostics, pathology/histology, radiology and DICOM concepts.
• Final group project: choose a medical domain and prepare data for research (structuring + basic analysis) plus data-access documentation with an ethics/teamwork focus.