Research access to large amounts of anonymized patient data.

Take all the data you have, come up with some theory to describe it, build the scheme into a lossless data compressor, and invoke it on the data set. Write down the compression rate you achieve, and then try to do better. And better. And better. This goal will force you to systematically improve your understanding of the data.

(Note that transforming a sufficiently well specified statistical model into a lossless data compressor is a solved problem, and the solution is called arithmetic encoding - I can give you my implementation, or you can find one on the web. So what I'm really suggesting is just that you build statistical models of the raw data, and try systematically to improve those models).