Python for Clinical Data
Mercy Ridge Hospital
You have just been hired as a clinical data analyst at Mercy Ridge Hospital, a regional teaching hospital with a busy cardiac ward. Your supervisor, Dr. Okafor, has been collecting patient outcome data for a year and needs your help to make sense of it. This course teaches Python programming through a continuous narrative arc of real clinical data tasks. You start by storing individual patient vitals as variables, progress to organising patient records with lists and dictionaries, then load a full year of ward data with Pandas, clean the messy clinical dataset, and finally build a Patient Risk Dashboard that identifies high-risk patients. Every Python concept is introduced because Dr. Okafor needs it to solve a genuine clinical question. You are not learning Python in the abstract. You are learning it because patient outcomes at Mercy Ridge depend on it.
Course Content
Your First Shift on the Ward
Recording patient vitals digitally instead of on paper charts.
Your First Patient
It is your first day at Mercy Ridge Hospital. Dr. Okafor hands you a clipboard of patient vitals and asks you to record them digitally.
The Morning Rounds
Dr. Okafor gives you heart rate readings from 8 patients on the morning rounds. You need to store them all in a single structure and look up specific patients.
Organising the Patient Registry
Moving from paper patient files to structured digital records.
Real Clinical Analysis
Working with a full year of cardiac ward data, loading, cleaning, and visualising patient outcomes.
The Ward Data Arrives
The hospital IT department sends a CSV file with 365 days of cardiac ward data. Dr. Okafor asks you to load it and see what is inside.
When Monitors Fail
You discover the ward dataset has missing vitals, duplicate admissions, and type errors. Dr. Okafor explains this is normal in clinical data.
The Risk Dashboard
Dr. Okafor needs a visual report for the hospital board meeting tomorrow. You need to create plots that show patient outcome patterns.