Hiring Your Data Management Team Posted on February 20, 2006 David J. Kupfer (bio) urges researchers to think carefully about hiring decisions when it comes to the data management team.

The first very large clinical trial that we received in the early 80s, which was this long-term treatment strategy for depression, my first hires, and everybody thought I was being a bit strange, was two data entry people and a management person who was really going to be in charge of ensuring the quality of the data and again had nothing to do per se with the actual recruitment, maintenance of patients, keeping them in the study and whatnot, and everybody looked at me, and I was saying, "Well, the only way we can deal with all the data that's going to come in is we've got to create that structure from a data management point of view before we ever admit the first patient." That was a very important lesson, and I can say that I'm very glad that we did that because it helped us tremendously.

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