Using Data for Both Research and Patient Care Posted on November 21, 2007 Victoria J. Grochocinski (bio) describes ongoing meetings with the research team in which study and patient progress is reviewed.

With respect to that infrastructure that you’re going to try to integrate your project into, remember that bipolar patients are coming to you for care in addition to participating in your study. You can use your data to help you care for those patients. For example in our clinic we have what we call “data” or “patient review meetings”, which serve several functions. First of all, your report can show all the important data that you need to determine if that patient is progressing not just in your study but in their care. If they’re showing a worsening, what does your protocol say if they show a certain level of worsening? So that’s at a patient care level.

Another level that these meetings serve is to see where you are in the study, so every month or so depending on your recruitment rates you should be looking at your recruitment rates and how well you’re doing there and how well patients are doing with all of the study procedures. If patients are having a lot of difficulty with procedures or they’re refusing in an unusual number to do a procedure, perhaps that’s a procedure you should be considering changing or dropping. And then finally a third valuable activity that goes on in one of these meetings it’s another quality check of your data so that if anybody in the room sees a data value that looks funny or they question why did the score go up or down precipitously, your data manager can go and check that out. And that way people are just knowing a lot more about — they have a much better feel this way for how the project’s going.

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