Missing Data in Healthcare Research:
Methods, Pitfalls and Modern Solutions
Thursday January 8, 2026 from 12:00-1:00pm
Virtual Teams Presentation
Healthcare research increasingly relies on complex data sources such as electronic health records (EHRs), observational cohorts, pragmatic trials, and real-world registries. Yet missing data remain pervasive and often poorly handled, introducing bias, reducing power, and threatening reproducibility. This talk provides a practical, applied overview of modern statistical strategies for addressing missingness in healthcare studies, emphasizing real-world implementation rather than purely theoretical derivations. We will review missing-data mechanisms (MCAR, MAR, MNAR), evaluate common pitfalls such as complete-case analysis and inappropriate single imputation, and introduce principled approaches including multiple imputation (MI), inverse probability weighting (IPW), mixed-effects models for repeated measures, and Bayesian methods. We then explore flexible sensitivity analyses for MNAR scenarios and illustrate each method using EHR-based examples. Attendees will gain a framework for selecting the right approach for their study design and will leave with pragmatic guidance for improving inference, transparency, and robustness in the presence of missing healthcare data.
Meet the Speaker
Zugui Zhang, PhD
Director of Biostatistics,
ChristianaCare
Dr. Zugui Zhang is director of biostatistics at iREACH, ChristianaCare and Fellow of American Heart Association. He received an MS in statistics from Arizona State University and his PhD in biostatistics from the University of Iowa. He joined ChristianaCare in 2007 and has been Director of Biostatistics since 2017. He holds appointments as Affiliated Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Delaware and Thomas Jefferson University. He has worked extensively on large, international, multi-center, randomized clinical trials and observational studies.
Microsoft Teams
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Meeting ID: 251 948 545 620 45
Passcode: CQ95tS6u
Dial in by phone
+1 302-483-7154,,212007427# United States, Wilmington
Please RSVP to Debra.Reese@ChristianaCare.org for instruction on obtaining CME credit for attendance
Work supported by an Institutional Development Award
(IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical
Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant
number U54-GM104941 (PI:Hicks) and the State of DE.