Tuesday, November 17, 2015

The Importance of Data Management in Clinical Trials: One Horror Story

One of the huge challenges that a clinical researcher may face is data management. In clinical research, data needs to be secure, easily accessible yet must be available forever. This is because once research has been published, some researchers may look back at the data of some previous clinical trials done on the subject to find out whether there is bias or not, or whether statistics has been done correctly or not. Thus data protection and security is a necessity in clinical research. Unfortunately, a lot of clinical research organizations do not realize this and simply rely on physical archives (pen and paper). This is extremely exhausting: looking for records and compiling data from 20,000 patients or research subjects! You will end up looking like this:

"Yes, doctor? I haven't finished looking at over 20,000 patient files"

Here is a video I want to show to you regarding the importance of data management and storage in clinical research. This is actually a horror story which may happen to any clinical researcher or any researcher/ author in that regard. 


This is what I am working on nowadays. My team is trying to think of solutions on how to deal with data problems in clinical research. This concept can also be applied in the field of medical informatics. Patient medical records should be kept and stored for a lifetime, in my opinion. We can actually do data analysis on those patient records later on. The most important reason why we should not lose those patient records is because of legal cases. For example, if a patient goes to court, how can you retrieve important data from medical examinations which you will need to testify in court if that data was simply lost? That's unforgivable!

Quit the laughing and lets get down to business. My team is currently working on these dents to make your life better, clinical researchers. 
Time to learn some programming doctors!


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