Plan for Data Management Posted on October 22, 2007 Rachel Manber (bio) explains the importance of entering and monitoring data consistently.

People don’t plan enough for data management; tend to not oversee the data as it comes in, and then when it comes time to enter the data they discover that they have missing data, that their study coordinator forgot to do a particular measure for about half of the patients or that there is a second page that people tend to not complete. And if you catch these things early and you monitor that all the time, you’re in much better shape.

And related to that, it’s extremely good advice to continuously enter the data as you are receiving it so that you’re not crunching at the end. You’re not to necessarily analyze the data halfway, because that is not advisable, but enter it and do quality control.

What I do myself is I give instructions to my staff, and the frequency at which they’re supposed to be conducting that, and at our staff meetings we go over that. We go over any issues that come up in the data entry – what is missing – so that there is information back to the study coordinator to know what to look for, where more needs to be emphasized for the patients. You know, “You need to turn this page over.” I mean, there are very simple things, but unless we’re on top of it, we just take it for granted and it doesn’t happen; it’s human.

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