ACTA Webinar: Analysing routinely-collected electronic hospital data: Benefits, challenges, and realities

15
Oct
2026

Routinely-collected hospital data offers statisticians an enormous and tempting resource, but its structure works against many of the assumptions we bring to analysis. Because these data are collected, stored, and optimised for mandatory reporting and billing rather than research, they shape and often distort how we define study populations, comparison groups, outcomes, and timelines.

This presentation examines what episode-level, fragmented, incomplete and skewed data means for analysis: how administrative coding drives outcome ascertainment, how unstable definitions and shifting reporting requirements confound long-term trends, and where these features quietly threaten the validity of otherwise standard approaches. I will also make the case that sound analysis of these data depends as much on relationships with the people who enter and manage them as on statistical expertise.

Presenter

Dr Taya Collyer