Googling the phrase “Clinical Data Capture” leads to an entire page of results dedicated to “Electronic Data Capture” for clinical trials. There is a vast number of articles and vendors that suggest they cover the existing challenges, technologies and innovations happening this area. But is this really true?
WHAT ARE THESE SOLUTIONS REALLY OFFERING?
Focus on gathering already electronic, structured data from existing data sources (EHRs, Clinical Data Warehouses, etc.)
Helping to create electronic or web based forms for collecting electronic, structured data during the trial.
Define what data is necessary to the trial and ensuring that it is captured.
ONLY WORRYING ABOUT NECESSARY DATA
The solution is a challenge to clinical trials and clinical documentation alike. If you are creating the data at the time of the trial, then although easier said than done, it’s relatively effortless to define this in advance and guarantee that it gets collected.
But what if a trial participant’s history, demographics, etc., are best captured from previous data collected about that participant? What if that data exists in documents or other unstructured sources?
SOMETIMES THE “NECESSARY DATA” IS NOT SO EASY TO OBTAIN
By deploying intelligent extraction software for clinical data capture, two problems are solved:
Searching through all the unstructured information to find the “necessary data”
Extracting that data, structuring it, and interfacing it to your electronic data capture platform to join all the other “necessary data” that you have gathered.
If you want to be sure you have all the “necessary data” for your clinical trials, then you need to be positive you are acquiring all the data by enriching your electronic data capture with intelligent clinical data extraction for unstructured data sources.
Extract helped one customer, Exact Sciences, provide unstructured document classification continuously in an easily accessible and secure location.
about the author: Ellen Bzomowski
With 20 years of experience in data capture and voice recognition, Ellen’s experience has focused on achieving higher efficiency 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.