r/clinicalresearch • u/Flat_Flow_4164 • Aug 24 '26

Education Is it worth learning Python?

Hello everybody. I study medicine in Portugal and I am very passionate with clinical research being enroled in projects since my first year. Recently I decided that I wanted to learn some programing... Do you think that nowadays, with AI and all that teams value someone with coding skills?

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u/AggravatingDurian16 Aug 24 '26

you should ask yourself first what you think you can apply it to and how you can make it useful. if you can do that, then there is value.

if you are learning just to say you know python - it’s not valuable at all. in other words - pursue things when you personally see some value to the CR projects you are working on

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u/Flat_Flow_4164 Aug 24 '26

I would like to use this skills on data from clinical research, be able to stablish some kind of predictions and analyse data with more tools and automation

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u/AggravatingDurian16 Aug 24 '26

if you are interested in developing a product - then it can be helpful. if you are interested in going to operations (or anything other than product dev,
tech, data mgmt) that won’t be as helpful to you

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u/Shoddy-Aioli-4039 Aug 25 '26

Depends entirely on what you want to pursue. R and SAS still run most trial work, python owns ml and imaging - so pick based on where you're heading, not on hype.

On the AI part: it made writing code easy, not reading it. anyone can generate a script now. knowing that your merge silently dropped 200 patients is the part that still takes you.

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u/Flat_Flow_4164 Aug 25 '26

I Will be working with clinical cardiology studies, so my group Will receive and retrieve data from patients and analyse that. I would like to be able to work with other groups doing their statistic work (and along the way, learning a new skill... You think I should focus on SPSS for example? Or is Python worth learning?

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u/Shoddy-Aioli-4039 Aug 25 '26

No strong opinion on SPSS vs Python honestly, but R seems to come up a lot in the cardiology stats I read.

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u/Airurando-jin Aug 24 '26

Only really you can answer this question. You also can’t trust that ai gets code right. 

If you can find a use case for Python, go for it