DPHARM 2023: Current State of Data Usage in Clinical Trials

In an interview at the 2023 DPHARM conference with ACT editor, Andy Studna, Amy Cramer, steering committee board co-chair, HL7 FHIR Accelerator Vulcan discusses what she is seeing with the use of data in clinical trials including how to balance collecting too much data and the "right" data.

Cramer: Interoperability has always been a passion of mine since the day that my binders fell apart on the floor as a clinical research coordinator and I said, “Oh my gosh there has to be a better way to do this than writing on paper.” Probably dating myself. But what I'm seeing is that we're looking not just at interoperability now but we’re looking at what data are we collecting and why? And so that's a really difficult question to ask because at some sides of the coin, yeah you don't want to collect more data than is necessary. Right? That makes sense. That's pragmatic. But at the other side of the coin you want to make sure that you're collecting the data that you're going to need in order to be able to evaluate and so how do you balance these two so that you don't collect more, but you have the right data in order to be able to move forward and that's a real big focus that I think a lot of people are leaning towards. it will really help with interoperability; we'll be reducing the amount of data that we have to move, but I think that's an interesting space.

Cramer also spoke on Vulcan and its HL7 FHIR Accelerator, which can be found here.