Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar, Laura Lee Johnson, and Elizabeth Stuart

Registration is open for the International Conference on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS), to be held in Charleston, South Carolina, January 10–12, 2018. Join fellow statisticians, economists, policy researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders in the health policy arena to discuss research needs and solutions to the methodological challenges in the design of studies and analysis of data for health policy research.

This year’s program features plenary talks by Robert Califf and Suchi Saria. Califf is an expert in cardiovascular medicine, health outcomes research, and clinical research. He is the Donald F. Fortin, MD, Professor of Cardiology at Duke University School of Medicine and former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Before his time at the FDA, Califf was vice chancellor for clinical and translational research at Duke University, director of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, and founding director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute.

Saria’s research interests are in statistical machine learning and precision health care, particularly designing data-driven tools for improving health care delivery. She is assistant professor of computer science, health policy, and statistics at The Johns Hopkins University. She was added to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Intelligent Systems 2015 “AI’s 10 to Watch” list, which acknowledges and celebrates rising stars in the artificial intelligence field. Additionally, she was selected as a DARPA Young Faculty awardee and to Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” in 2016.

The ICHPS program also includes workshops on January 10 and 12, which are free for students. Workshop topics include a three-part session on causal inference; sign up for one, two, or all three sections, depending on the topics that interest you most. Other workshops include interpretation of patient-reported outcome and complex health survey data; social network analysis; fitting models in Python and Apache Spark; and using data from MEPS, NHANES, and MCBS.

The conference committee is setting up a free two-hour health communications training workshop Friday afternoon, after the closing plenary. Once details are available, all conference registrants will be notified and sent an Evite to sign up for a seat.

The contributed and invited sessions will include participants from around the world and cover a variety of topics. With research on impacts of health policy changes on pre-term births, Medicare expansion, cancer screening methods, environmental health, and linking registries and administrative data sets, the program includes methods and applications for everyone.

Finally, distinguished researchers will be honored Friday with mid-career and long-term excellence awards sponsored by the ASA Health Policy Statistics Section.

This year, participants can get to know each other through networking dinners, receptions, and tours of historical Charleston. Most local activities will have additional costs, but group discounts are being arranged where possible.

Register today. Also, visit the website for hotel and travel information. If the group rate is not available online for your dates, you can contact the hotel directly by phone and they may be able to assist you.