Welcome to the NSAPH Handbook#

The handbook offers information on data, software and analysis.

Web page#

Find the National Studies on Air Pollution and Health (NSAPH) group official web page here.

Basecamp#

Basecamp is the main channel of communication of NSAPH. It is central to all meaningful collaboration and teamwork.

Once you’ve been added to Basecamp, from the homepage you can connect with people by joining multiple groups/projects. The two main groups are:

NSAPH group brings together researchers, visiting researchers, program coordinators, and data scientists from multiple Universities and Organizations with a common goal, understanding climate change and environmental impacts on health outcomes and regulatory policy.

NSAPH biostats group it is mostly comprised of active members in the Harvard departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health.

Depending on your role, you can be added to additional groups/projects. Each group has message boards, chats, schedule information and more.

If you are going to start a new research project, read NSAPH Research Project Life Cycle.

GitHub presence#

A GitHub organization is a shared account where all organization members can collaborate across many projects at once. NSAPH has five organizations on GitHub meant to help you find and use group resources.

If you do not have write access to a repository, ask for help. As an NSAPH member, it is not necessary to create forks to contribute.

  1. NSAPH Projects - Host a GitHub repository for all NSAPH-led member projects; moving forward, all NSAPH member-led projects should have a repository here;

  2. NSAPH Software - The development of reusable software packages for analysis;

  3. NSAPH Data Platform - Captures all the code that went into creating and maintaining the data platform;

  4. NSAPH Data Processing - Captures the data pipelines for data transformations and aggregation;

  5. NSAPH - Gathers past projects but will continue to be used for miscellaneous projects that don’t belong in the previous categories (no new analysis projects should be started here). By joining NSAPH Research Team, one can view members’ private codebases.

Table of content#

Data

NSAPH Forms

Infrastructure and Tools

Software

The Team

References

Common acronyms#

CMS#

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

FASSE#

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Secure Environment research computing cluster

FFS#

fee-for-service

MCBS#

Medicare Current Beneficiary Summary

MBSF#

Master Beneficiary Summary File

MEDPAR#

Medicare Provider Analysis and Review

IRB#

The Institutional Review Board