Ruth Etzioni, PhD has been on the faculty at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center since 1991 and is an affiliate professor of biostatistics and health services at the University of Washington. She develops statistical models and methods for health policy and is a member of national cancer policy panels including the American Cancer Society and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. She has developed and taught a new curriculum in statistical methods for graduate students in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington; the course focuses on health care analytics using contemporary, publicly available data resources. The popularity of this course led her to conceive of and develop the proposed text. Dr. Etzioni received her undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Operations Research from the University of Cape Town and her PhD in Statistics from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Micha Mandel, PhD, is professor of statistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Micha has vast experience teaching at all levels from undergraduate to PhD students, and has been engaged with a wide range of problems in medicine and health care. His interaction with students and researchers from different fields led him to develop tools to explain sophisticated statistical concepts and methods in ways that are accessible to many audiences. His main areas of research include biased sampling, survival analysis, and forensic statistics, but he continues to expand his reach, most recently to the estimation of COVID-19 natural history. He has published in many high-profile statistical journals including Biometrics, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Statistics in Medicine. Micha received his PhD in Statistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Roman Gulati, MS, has been a senior statistical analyst at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center since 2005. Mr. Gulati is a designer, developer, and analyst of statistical models to investigate population impacts of national clinical practice patterns and cancer control policies. He has led or contributed to many independent and collaborative modeling studies for the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network of the National Cancer Institute. He is also chief biostatistician for the prostate cancer research program at the Fred Hutch and the University of Washington, supporting many molecular, preclinical, and clinical research studies. Mr. Gulati received graduate training first in mathematics and then in Chinese before earning his MS in Statistics from Oregon State University.

• Highly interdisciplinary - drawing from statistics, health services, economics, and informatics
• Goes beyond the formulas, explaining why different methods work, how to choose from among them, and how to avoid misinterpreting results - to create confident users of appropriate analytic methods
• Addresses topical questions such as data science versus statistics, prediction versus explanation
• Provides a wide range of analytic and regression-type models specific to research questions about health care use and costs of care
In-depth discussion on selection bias in observational data methods for inferring causality
• Supplementary Material Includes: Code and data for all examples and model analyses, Code for data processing and analysis, Code segments for simulation models