Rationale
Clinical data are reported by individual trials in various ways which may cause a labor intensive process to gain data insights. The Clinical Data Standards Initiative, in collaboration with CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium), C-Path (Critical Path Institute), NCI-EVS (National Cancer Institute – Enterprise Vocabulary Service) and FDA as part of the CFAST (Coalition For Accelerating Standards and Therapies), aims to develop industry-wide Data Standards in priority Therapeutic Areas (TAs) to support the exchange and submission of clinical research and metadata, while improving patient safety and clinical trial outcomes.
Benefits
The Clinical Data Standards Initiative provides a foundation or platform that will enable data aggregation, cross study analysis and end-to-end data flow, thus providing many benefits to stakeholders such as:
- Facilitating the combination of data from multiple disparate sources for analyses to plan new studies & enhance medical and scientific insights and knowledge, thus enhancing disease management
- Enabling operational efficiencies in data management and analysis
- Enabling more consistent data collection in clinical studies leading to more efficient studies with higher quality data which ultimately leads to improved knowledge about safety and efficacy of the compound
- Facilitating the demonstration of traceability of data
- Enabling more efficient regulatory reviews
- Providing a foundation for interoperability as stated in FDA Guidance on electronic regulatory submissions (Feb 2014)
- Enabling future integration of clinical studies with Electronic Health Record (EHR) or Electronic Medical Record (EMR)
Available Solutions
The Therapeutic Area Data Standards are freely available at the CDISC website on the following link. An overview of the ongoing Therapeutic Area Data Standards development projects is also available. Through the SHARE (Shared Health And Research Electronic library) technology environment, we have the ability to facilitate and accelerate setting Data Standards in Therapeutic Areas. SHARE, a cornerstone of the CDISC technical roadmap, is a global electronic repository for developing, integrating and accessing CDISC metadata standards in electronic format. SHARE is expected to dramatically improve integration among CDISC foundational standards and controlled terminologies, and support greater interoperability with healthcare.