July 19, 2012

A Patient View of Clinical Collections ¹

by Jerry Matczak • LCOI • Tags: clinical collections, clinical research, Drug development, patient

Today we’re going to take a look at the Clinical Collections tool from the point of view of the patient. Patients (as well as their family members) have a unique, personal perspective on disease, and many quickly become experts in their own right. They tend to put in a lot of hours on- and off-line, reading research materials and talking to other people to get answers and help.

Where Clinical Collections helps all kinds of researchers – physicians, scientists, and clinicians – pull together relevant data for their work, our team has found that the tool is also valuable for patients and others who are doing research of their own. Take a look as we walk through Clinical Collections with the eyes of two patients, one who simply wants to pull together relevant information, and one who is looking to be involved in a clinical trial close to their home.
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June 7, 2012

Guided walkthrough: Timeline view ^Reply

by Jerry Matczak • Clinical Collections, Clinical Trials, Innovations in Progress, Open Innovation • Tags: clinical collections, clinical trials, ClinicalTrials.gov, guide, Timeline View, trials, tuberculosis

Last time, we discussed the Map view to see clinical trials plotted on a map. Today, we’re going to explore the timeline view, which gives a chronological map of sorts to visualize clinical trials.

Introduction

With such a huge library of clinical trial data house within our system, we want to give our users as many ways to discover trials that would aid their research.

Let’s say, for example, you want to see all the tuberculosis trials that occurred in the 2000′s and filter to those which took place in the last half of the decade. How can you filter through dozens of search returns in a simple way? By showing an interactive timeline view, we’ve made this possible.

To see more, let’s dig in.

Plotting your timeline

To find the timeline view, let’s continue our tuberculosis user case from our series of posts. In this case, I’m searching for trials regarding tuberculosis. To see timeline view, simply select Timeline from the list of options at top of the search screen:

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May 24, 2012

Contesting TB ²

by Jerry Matczak • LCOI • Tags: clinical collections, clinical trials, ClinicalTrials.gov, collaboration, CPTR, inTB, Stop TB Partnership, TB Commons, tuberculosis

A quick nod to the Stop TB Partnership and it’s New Drug Working Group, who have put together the Innovate TB (inTB) Contest. inTB gathers videos, photos and write-ups that tell stories of innovation focused on the fight against TB.

Here’s our TB Commons entry along with a few others that have caught my eye:

TB Commons

TB Commons is our notion of a disease commons, where those interested in advancing clinical research on TB can access clinicaltrials.gov data using our Clinical Collection tool. In addition, a powerful Answers Forum serves as a place to share collections of trials, and generate knowledge related to TB research. Give it a try!

The Delft Youth Theatre for Health Group

The Delft Youth Theatre for Health Group raises awareness through performances of “Bad News? Good News!” in an Afrikan community. No lights, camera, props or trained actors needed – just everyday people learning about and sharing valuable information to fight disease, and having some fun doing it. More…

May 17, 2012

Clinical Collections: Using map view to drill down ¹

by Jerry Matczak • Clinical Collections, Clinical Trials, TB • Tags: clinical collections, clinical trials data, Google Maps, tuberculosis

Note: this post is the 2nd of a 3 part series explaining our Clinical Collections tool and helping users learn more about the facility this provides. Please find Guided Walkthrough:Faceted search here.

We, as a society, love graphs, photos and infographics. In essence, we love seeing data represented in a visual manner. Also, in the last 5 or so years, we’ve been an online public which absolutely loves maps.

Think about it – if you’re looking for real estate online, the best way to find your perfect next home is by looking at the homes for sale in a map area where you can click on each home and see the streets surrounding it.

In this spirit, we’re proud to have a really cool map view feature in our Clinical Collections Tool.

To find the map view, let’s continue our Tuberculosis use case from our faceted search walk-through. In this case, I’m searching for trials regarding tuberculosis. To see map view, simply select Map from the list of options at top of the search screen:

You can then pull up the map view, showing all the tuberculosis search returns overlaid on to a map.