The Importance of Bio-statistics
Bio-statistics is a major discipline in health sciences that engages in collecting, investigating, translating and providing the best possible analytical and informative insights to any data produced and consumed in the health care industry.
This short essay will try to expound more on bio-statistics and the contributions of bio-statisticians in the healthcare industry.
According to Muennig & Bounthavong(2016), bio-statisticians focus on collecting, investigating as well as translating data produced in fields such as general health, public health, general science and biomedical sciences among many other health related fields.
To achieve this, Bio-statisticians are required to have expert knowledge in mathematics, computer science and statistics to enable them analyze large data sets (Nair & Doksum, 2007).
These skills help them participate in research, data collection, data extraction, its analysis, interpretation stages as well data delivery in a consumable way to the user.
The primary goal of bio-statistics is to develop all the statistical methods and apply them to the human health topics to improve the people’s health as a whole.
Bio-statistic techniques help public health community answer questions such as; Is breastfeeding by the HIV-positive mothers linked with the infant mortality? How are the MRI brain scans of the schizophrenic patients different from the people without this disease? Another example would be using bio-statistic methods to determine a query such as; is drinking water by-products associated with miscarriages? Using bio-statistic techniques, one can determine and differentiate between aspects such as exposure and social outcomes among others (Muennig & Bounthavon(2016).
Bio-statisticians play a major role in the health and agriculture industries, and that is because one needs to understand a population’s health needs before engineering an intervention to improve the needs of that community.
This means that data needs to be collected, analyzed and interpreted in a way that reflects the exact prevailing conditions of the community in question, if any any interventions were to lead to better outcomes in the target community.
For instance, is the role of bio-statisticians to analyze various plans and grand writings, carry out report writing, interim analyses, sampling design, and randomization.
Various bio-statistics researchers have collaborated with other healthcare experts on several studies leading to the need to develop new methods of analysis: the missing data, censored data, correlated data, and the longitudinal data among others. Bio-statisticians works in different fields, which include but are not limited to; academics, agriculture, public health industry, pharmaceutical and the contract research organizations (CROs), the not-for-profit organizations and the government of various nations worldwide.
Bio-statistics techniques are mainly applied in areas such as, academic methodology, especially when it comes to categorical data, survival analysis, missing data among others. It also concentrates a lot in the environmental conservation, injury prevention in various companies, reproductive health prediction, and pediatrics In Sterrett (2014).
When it comes to pursuing bio-statistics, one must know that most bio-statisticians major in bio-statistics, math and computer science or general statistics. In Sterrett (2014) strongly recommended that for three entire semesters one should study discrete math, calculus, linear algebra, inference, real analysis. However, this may vary with different colleges on how they have planned their curriculum.
In terms of career, today’s bio-statistics, it tends to offer lucrative salaries and a variety of projects that go beyond the simple calculations. There is also very little competition in the biostatistic field today as well since it is a a relatively new discipline, and hasn’t attracted a lot of clout among college students in the globe yet.
In conclusion, bio-statistics is both a highly engaging and rewarding field, especially for youngsters who love numbers, and are also looking to be on the front-line towards improving and revolutionizing the healthcare industry. Bio-statisticians are in the forefront of understanding the efficacy of the global healthcare industry, as they are in the business of researching, interpreting and analyzing research, which mainly focuses on prolonging life. They also contribute to the prevention of all manner of disease by identifying all the risks factors using bio-statistics techniques such as randomized controlled trials among others. This in turn leads to better interventions by the public health authorities leading to improved health and lifestyle services.
References
In Sterrett, A. (2014). 101 careers in mathematics.
Muennig, P., & Bounthavong, M. (2016). Cost-effectiveness analyses in health: A practical approach.
Nair, V., & Doksum, K. A. (2007). Advances in statistical modelling and inference: Essays in honour of Kjell A. Doksum. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific.
