Have you been involved with clinical data management (CDM)?
If so, you know that following a defined and consistent process will lead to statistically sound data from clinical trials—every hospital’s dream. Part of that process may involve converting unstructured data into structured data which generally includes:
- Simple data entry projects (importing faxes or scanned document data exactly as it appears)
- Translating certain data into a defined entry (i.e. “positive” vs. “negative”) consistently
Unstructured data can bring challenges to the design of your “data entry” phase. In many cases, an electronic form can be used to collect real-time data from participants over time and populate your clinical data management system.
But what happens when data from their medical history is required and is stuck in lab result documents, specialist reports, etc.?
What happens if these histories are so voluminous that data quality is compromised by the sheer variations and potential fatigue in searching through them?
What happens when cost to review and abstract potentially becomes unbearable to the budget for the study?
Advances in intelligent clinical data extraction allow for technology to support and automate this process with ease. This technology can sift through documents for you and ensure better consistency with unwavering reviews of each paragraph, sentences and words to be sure that nothing is missed. Like the second-pass verification that is recommended for two human abstractors, using automated clinical data extraction with human verification allows the use of powerful software technology to search the volumes of documents and pull out the desired information, then leaning on the power of the human eyes and brain to validate. This is the perfect combination - capitalizing on the strengths of both the software and human touch.
So as you design your next clinical data management project, keep in mind the power of intelligent clinical data extraction to assist you in finding, extracting, and capturing data consistently and completely.
To learn more about our automated extraction software, click the link below to request a free demo.
