Degang Wang

From Databricks to Your Analytics Tool: A RWD Workflow

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Why Not Just Load Everything Locally?

Real-world data (RWD) — claims, EHR, registries — is massive. A single claims database can have billions of rows across diagnosis, procedure, and pharmacy tables. You cannot pd.read_csv() your way through it.

The workflow that works:

Manipulate data in Databricks — filter, join, aggregate using SQL on distributed compute
Create an analytic-ready table — a focused cohort with only the columns and rows you need
Bring the result to your analytics tool — Python, R, or SAS for statistical analysis and visualization

This post walks through that workflow using a diabetes cohort as an example. While we use Databricks here, the same pattern applies to any big data computing engine — Snowflake, Impala, AWS Athena, or Google BigQuery. The principle is the same: reduce data remotely, then bring the result to your analytics tool.

Mass General Brigham EHR Data: A Real-World Data Resource for Research

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

What Is Mass General Brigham?

Mass General Brigham (MGB), formerly Partners HealthCare, is one of the largest academic health systems in the United States. It includes Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and several other hospitals and community health centers across New England. The system serves millions of patients and generates rich longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data.

Reproducibility in Real-World Evidence: Lessons from the REPEAT Initiative

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Paper

Wang SV, Kattinakere Sreedhara S, Schneeweiss S, & REPEAT Initiative. Reproducibility of real-world evidence studies using clinical practice data to inform regulatory and coverage decisions. Nature Communications. 2022;13:5126. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32310-3

Databricks Connect: Run Spark Code from Your Local IDE

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Why Databricks Connect?

The Databricks web notebook is great for interactive exploration, but sometimes you want to:

Use your preferred local IDE (VS Code, PyCharm, etc.)
Version control your code with git
Run scripts in CI/CD pipelines
Debug with local tools

Databricks Connect lets you do all of this while still using a remote Databricks cluster for compute.

Life Stories — Coming Soon

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Coming soon…

Authoring mathematical formulae

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Authoring mathematical and chemical equations

Cleanwhite theme now has built-in $\KaTeX$ support, so that you can easily include complex mathematical formulae into your web page, either inline or centred on its own line. The theme uses Hugo’s embedded instance of the KaTeX display engine to render mathematical markup to HTML at build time. With this server side rendering of formulae, the same output is produced, regardless of your browser or your environment.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About Me

Degang Wang is a real-world data (RWD) and analytics practitioner who combines epidemiology, statistical methodology, and modern data platforms to generate credible evidence for clinical and business decisions. His experience centers on RWD study execution, data source evaluation, and the development of scalable, cloud-native analytics infrastructure.

Degang works in HEOR Epidemiology and Real-World Evidence at Regeneron, with prior experience at Baylor College of Medicine, Truven Health Analytics (now part of Merative), Amgen, and Allergan (now part of AbbVie), spanning academic, consulting, and industry settings.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Posts Archive

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