This text will demonstrate the different data mining techniques and how they can be used to investigate patient records and public health records with the dual objective of decreasing costs while improving the quality of care. In this chapter, we give a basic introduction to the data mining process (section 3). We also give basic information concerning the datasets that we will be using to demonstrate the techniques (section 2). In subsequent chapters, we will examine specific questions to demonstrate how the various data mining techniques can be used to investigate the electronic medical record, billing data, and other healthcare databases to satisfy our objectives.