Abstract
Epidemiology is foundation of public health and a core discipline in healthcare management. It deals with problem identification (disease burden) and their prioritization, evaluate cause-and-effect relationship, developing interventions and their implementation, surveillance and monitoring, and evaluation of health care. The chapter briefly describes basic epidemiologic principles and methods in study of health and disease in populations. It illustrates how understanding of distribution and determinants of disease in a population can contribute to identification of causal factors, and transmission and spread of disease. The chapter presents descriptive and analytic epidemiologic study designs and randomized controlled trials. It briefly describes case-control and cohort studies, and risk assessment and causal inferences. The chapter also briefly presents important public health practices—disease surveillance, screening for disease, investigations of epidemics and disease outbreaks, epidemiologic data for strategic planning and development of health policies in health care.
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Gupta, S.D. (2022). Principles of Epidemiology. In: Gupta, S.D. (eds) Healthcare System Management. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3076-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3076-8_3
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