R/Medicine 2019 kicked off on Thursday with two outstanding workshops. It was difficult to choose between the two, but fortunately both presenters developed rich sets of materials that are available online.

Alison Hill delivered R Markdown for Medicine with an elegant HTML exposition masterfully created to cultivate beginners while still engaging experienced R Markdown users.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

In four sections: (1) R Markdown Anatomy, (2) Outputs and Tables, (3) Graphics for Communication and (4) Data and Workflows she developed aspects of R Markdown aimed at statisticians and clinicians writing medical document which should also delight a wide audience of R Markdown users.

In the parallel session, Elizabeth (Beth) Atkinson distilled years of experience Wrangling survival data at the Mayo Clinic while presenting new functionality from version 3.0 of Terry Therneau’s Survival package which contains significant new material on multi-state models. (Version 3.0 is expected to make it to CRAN very soon, but if you can’t wait, you can install the new version from GitHub with: install_github("therneau/survival", dependencies=TRUE). Terry, who will be delivering the opening keynote presentation, also attended the workshop. It was a rare treat to hear Beth and Terry discuss best practices, pitfalls and common errors while fielding questions from the attendees. Beth assembled so much material it will take a “month of Sundays” to work through it all, but I doubt that there is a better source of material anywhere that makes the special difficulties of wrangling survival data more easily accessible. The following gem shows up early in the presentation.

R/Medicine is off to a great start.