Three simple ways to refresh your data management practices Since we're all about saving time, we already did the hard work for you by creating the list below of three (reasonable) data management goals to tackle. These goals are sure [...]
Tips for Submitting Data to NIMH National Database for Autism Research (NDAR) Semi-annual submissions to NDAR are a requirement for a subset of NIH funded grants. Prometheus Research frequently submits data to the NDA on behalf of our autism-focused clients. [...]
Good Data Management Practices for Data Analysis: Part 3, Relational Databases As we illustrated in the first post in this series, data cleaning and data transformation are two major bottlenecks in data analysis. Both can be streamlined by using [...]
Good Data Management Practices for Data Analysis: Part 2, Tidy Data Note: This post draws heavily from concepts described in an article, slide deck, and presentation by Hadley Wickham, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Rice University and Chief Scientist [...]
Good Data Management Practices for Data Analysis: Part 1 As far as research experiences go, it’s hard to beat the moment when you finally get to analyze and interpret the data you worked so hard to obtain. Unfortunately, it’s [...]
Research Trends: Repurposing Healthcare Registries to Improve Quality, Performance, and Outcomes Registries have begun to take new shape as medical societies and associations realize the potential value of their data. For those of you unfamiliar with what a healthcare registry [...]
Our Top 5 Rules for Stress-Free NDAR Data Submission After many years of experience submitting to NDAR, Prometheus has learned a thing or two. With that knowledge, we’ve put together a list of tips for approaching your NDAR data submission. [...]
A Brief Introduction to Clinical Nomenclatures Vocabulary management systems in electronic health records (EHRs) standardize how medical information is communicated. Although primarily intended to improve patient care, they also benefit researchers by bringing structure to complicated, nuanced, and dynamic health [...]
Help! I’m Drowning in a Sea of Changing Data! Tips for Getting Control of Your Data When It Feels Like Your Data Controls You (So You Can Finally Sleep At Night) Not everyone will admit to having this problem, but [...]
Record Matching: Facilitating Rich Data Sets When Merging Clinical Database The digitization of health records is making the aggregation of EHRs, prescription claims information, and other clinical data easier than ever before. But before analyzing clinical data collected from different [...]
NLP: Tapping Into EHR Text Fields Electronic health records (EHRs) are digitizing valuable medical data on a massive scale. However, up to 70% of meaningful information for medical registries, outcomes researchers, and clinicians is held within practitioner notes. These free [...]
The New Face of Research Surveys: Opportunities and Challenges Surveys have historically been one of the most important tools available for conducting empirical research. Today, they continue to be prominent within social and behavioral science research and play growing roles in [...]
The Pitfalls of Spreadsheet Data Management Spreadsheet software is almost as ubiquitous as the personal computer itself. Even in rigorous research contexts, programs like Microsoft Excel offer an environment for ad hoc analyses, back-of-the-envelope calculations, dashboard prototyping, and more. But [...]
EHRs for Clinical Outcomes Research: How to Maintain Researcher Productivity Opportunities for advancing clinical outcomes research are on the rise. This is largely thanks to electronic health records (EHRs)—a patient care tool that is already capturing meaningful clinical information on an [...]
Research Trends: Repurposing Healthcare Registries to Improve Quality, Performance, and Outcomes With the growing digitization of the patient record and care in general, the medical registry has become increasingly important. Having a centralized data repository tailored to a specific set [...]
Usability 101: Usability in Software Design and Interface Design When we design a product, we want to ensure at least two things. First, the product should be useful (of course). Second, the product should be usable. Usefulness doesn't matter [...]
Automating Care: Where We’re Going and How We’ll Get There In clinical contexts, “automation” is a buzzword. It’s meant to inspire images of doctors' offices filled with computers as they calculate ways to improve patient outcomes at lower costs. This [...]
How to Reshape Long-Format Excel Data into Wide-Format SPSS Data As a provider of integrated data management services, we often answer a wide variety of questions relating to data manipulation. One of the most common questions that we encounter is [...]
How A Single Sheet of Paper Can Transform Your User Experience What does a sheet of paper and an expensive, fancy computer lab have in common? Paper evokes tradition, while computers evoke innovation—in fact, we often perceive cutting-edge computers as [...]
How Amazon Reminded Us That Not All Business Associates Agreements (BAAs) Are Created Equal Ever since Amazon announced that it was changing its policy to sign BAAs for HIPAA-compliant data storage, we’ve been eager and excited. That sentiment soon turned [...]
NIMH Expands Support for Open Source RexDB®, Funds $450K Grant Prometheus Research has been awarded $450,000 by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to extend its Open Source Research Exchange Database (RexDB) for the management [...]
Data Sharing in Clinical Research Suppose you and I are clinical researchers who both work in the Boston area. We want to collaborate on a project together. We’re interested in finding genetic markers of treatment response and non-response among patients [...]
Tips for Getting Control of Your Data: Back to Basics, Nouns and Verbs In our last installment of Tips for Getting Control of Your Data series, we suggested using a revision control system to help keep track of your data files as they [...]
The Perils of Disposable Data Management A researcher collects the first batch of data from her research study. She excitedly cuts and pastes the data from multiple spreadsheets to get it into one master spreadsheet. Eager to make sure the [...]
Prometheus Research awarded $700,000 for Autism research Prometheus announced that it has been awarded $700,000 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to extend its Open Source Research Exchange Database (RexDB) for the management of autism spectrum [...]
Tips for Successful Grant Proposal Writing: # 3 Make a New Friend Earlier this summer we posted tip # 2 of our grant proposal writing series which highlighted the importance of remembering your (5ish) W's. Our next recommendation is to [...]
Form Design Tip 3: Avoid Redundancy Most studies require multiple forms to capture all necessary participant information: a medical history form, a family history form, a demographic information form, a previous diagnoses form, etc. If any of the forms capture [...]
Tips for Successful Grant Proposal Writing: #2 Remember Your W’s Summer is an excellent time to get a jump on grant proposal writing. Since I know you've followed the advice I provided in Part 1 of this series on Tips [...]
Form Design Tip 2: Usability The best practice form design mantra: the most important thing is usability. No one collects data without the intention of analyzing it. Similarly, no one designs forms to elicit information that won't be useful at some [...]
Can a data sharing plan advance your research goals? Most investigators think of data sharing plans as yet another annoying administrative requirement. Here comes some clueless funding agency with this wacky idea that another researcher might actually use your data! [...]
