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, complete the form below to request a free demo.
About the Author: Ellen Bzomowski
With 20 years of experience in data capture and voice recognition, Ellen’s experience has focused on achieving higher efficiencies and automation in getting data where it will be most useful to an organization. At Extract Systems, she continues to focus on the same ideas and works to get the word out about how Extract Systems’ advanced data capture and redaction solutions make more data valuable and accessible, while securing anything that is private. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University and lives and works in Boston.