MI-Support Hands-On Workshop

Using R for Data Analysis in Public Health

Session plan

Presentation (30 minutes)

• Uses of R
• Examples of R “in the wild”
• MICOM & MI-Support
  • MI-Support & ICHD

Workshop (1 hour, 30 minutes)

So R? It’s pretty cool?

• What we’ll see today can be done at different levels, with different tools
• Excel, Python, and more can all be leveraged depending on the project/preferences
• R has a good user interface, is free, and has a lot of capabilities, which is why we use it, and recommend it

Uses of R

The list goes on and on and on and on

• Usually think of R for statistical analyses and maybe plots?
• But can be as complicated / or not as you want
  • Dashboards / websites
    
  • Reproducible analyses and reports
  • Data processing checks and pipelines
  • Book and paper publishing

Useful for data management, too!

Standard procedures can be developed and shared within and across teams.

• Data operations
  • Deduplicating records
  • “Fuzzy matching” for place names, demographic categories
  • Supressing identifiable data
• Data communication
  • Standard themes for on-brand visualizations

Example: Dashboard

California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard

Example: UM wastewater monitoring

U-M Wastewater Monitoring Dashboard

Resources for learning R

• The Epidemiologist R Handbook

• R for Data Science
  • Written by Hadley Wickham, the lead author of the tidyverse

Resources for finding help

• Google!
• LLMs, yeah! (With caveats)
  • DO NOT EVER copypaste or upload data into these tools
  • Also, keep in mind, it can send you down a rabbit hole, or into a trap!
    • Ex: geocoding – it’ll tell you how to do it… but maybe that’s bad!

MICOM = Integrator Center

• Part of Insight Net, funded through CDC’s Center for Forecasting & Analytics
• Partnership between the University of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS)
• Work to develop modeling tools and data analytic pipelines
• Integrated into MDHHS operational workflows and decision-making

What is MI-Support?

How does MI-Support work?

1. Health department identifies a project that they may not have the staffing/resources to complete
2. Member of the health department reaches out to MI-Support via Google Form or email, providing details about the project they are looking to complete
3. Request enters queue for review by MI-Support team
4. MI-Support deploys team to assist with the requested project

Projects so far

• R Workshops: 14 17 on various topics
• Automated Reports for STIs and gastrointestinal conditions
• Mapping vaccine coverage and VFC sites in R
• Dashboards and enhanced analytics for firearm injuries, Legionnaires’ surveillance
• Streamlining communicable disease & TB reporting for bi-weekly interdisciplinary teams
• Vaccination geo-spatial analysis

Taking advantage

Have project ideas for your work or your team(s)?

• Email: micom-misupport@umich.edu
• MI-Support’s website, where you’ll find a link to our project submission form
• Talk to Marisa, Jack, or Stephanie today

Funding acknowledgement

Main task: replicating ICHD figure

We will introduce R by replicating Figure 11.2 from Ingham County’s 2024 Communicable Disease Surveillance Report, created by Danielle Siwula

Setup

1. Copy resources from MICOM Hub’s workshop page:
   • https://micom-hub.org/r_workshops.html
2. Open RStudio, then open a new R script file.

Thank you!

We’ll continue this in the worksheet.

# intro_R_workshop_20260724.R
#
# This script file contains the code I wrote during MI-Support's Intro to R
#   workshop hosted by the Ingham County Health Department on
#   Friday, July 24, 2026.
# For help on this stuff later, I can use MI-Support's R Office Hours link:
#   https://calendly.com/jackjacobs-misupport/30min
#
# Author: {your name here} ({your@email.here})