What’s the Business Intelligence Angle?
Well, we’ll get to that. Through our work with certain technologies, we find ourselves supporting clinical trials operations, data management and analysis – each of which have distinct operational needs – but the linking factor is the tools in use. We’re not going to name any names, but the same tools commonly used by biostatisticians and data managers to do their jobs are also used in other industries as pure-play business intelligence (BI) tools. Let’s look at one particularly troublesome piece of the process in slightly closer detail – the portion between “deciding to write a protocol” and “study lock.” What’s at the center of this process is data – actually a flow of data, from patient / investigator, through capture, to management and analysis. But, which data is collected is a question answered by the nature of the science being done, defined in the study protocol. And how to analyze that data is described somewhat in the Protocol and, in greater detail, in its derivative, the st
