Do some preliminary research using background sources to familiarize yourself with the terminology and basic information about your topic. The more you know going in, the easier it will be to make sense of your data later.
Researchers and scholars who collect data to make new discoveries about disease with the goal of expanding the pool of scientific knowledge and identifying potential interventions to improve outcomes.
Researchers are increasingly sharing their original data alongside published articles. Data sharing helps others reproduce and validate experiments and reuse old data to test new hypotheses. You can search for this data in open data repositories like ICPSR.