Why is Clinical Data Collection Important?

Clinical data is a credible source for healthcare professionals and researchers. With the help of health surveys, electronic health records, patient registries, clinical trials, or administrative data, researchers can collect clinical data.

You may wonder, why is clinical data collection important when these indicate only numbers? Analyzing the data is crucial before a pharmaceutical company decides to manufacture a new drug. Nevertheless, doctors review the effectiveness before implementing a newly discovered drug regimen on patients.

In this article, we will discuss the fields where utilizing clinical data is a must.

7 Reasons Why Clinical Data Collection is Important

As a healthcare professional, there is zero chance for you to ignore any details about treating a patient. Therefore, clinical data helps you make more accurate decisions about treatment methods and drug choices.

Continue reading to know how clinical data can help you achieve top-notch medical service in your institution.

● Implementing AI in Healthcare

If you are looking for an advanced system to upgrade your patient’s healthcare service, an AI application is a must. It can automatically collect patient data and help make your administrative processes more efficient. You can either analyze previously stored data using AI or use AI to collect and store on-time patient data.

You can predict, prepare, and plan a treatment regime for patients by detecting high-risk factors and implementing AI in your system. By reviewing and summarizing the clinical trial data, AI will assist you in determining which faster and more accurate dosage plan is best for the patient. Learn more about how you can implement machine learning and AI to utilize clinical trial data.

● Personalized Treatment Plan

To treat diseases such as cancer or organ failure, the patient usually needs a quick and effective treatment plan. It becomes hard for physicians to determine whether patients need a transplant or an operation.

Therefore, they seek expert opinions from other specialist physicians. However, creating a treatment team that includes foreign physicians is expensive and time-consuming. Hence, with the help of cloud storage of clinical data, physicians can access patient data from anywhere around the world.

Therefore, whether it is quantitative or qualitative data of the patient, physicians can analyze them in no time and craft a personalized treatment plan.

● Helping Patients With EHR

You may have heard of EHR software that helps collect patients’ clinical data from various sources.

EHR, or electronic health record, is a system that includes clinical observations about the patient’s current state, test results, diagnosis, disease condition, medication, and everything related to his health.

The unique feature of EHR is that it has a predictive function integrated into the system. A patient using the system will be notified about a test that needs to be taken again.

If properly customized, the EHR system can help the patient manage their medication and remind them to buy more when the stock is limited.

EHR is a wonderful solution for large settings, such as hospitals or clinics, where documenting clinical data on paper is not possible.

To use the data to improve the service, EHR can help with documentation, billing, management tools, e-prescribing, strengthening the patient-doctor relationship, and dashboards for overall data capturing for individual patients from start to finish.

● Cost Reduction

The world economy is uncontrolled in many parts of the world and the health sector is facing a great impact because of that. Again, from the raw materials of the medicine to the medical equipment, almost everything is getting highly expensive. So, the cost of receiving healthcare service is getting higher day-by-day.

Analyzing healthcare data and making more informed decisions about a patient’s treatment regime can help both the authorities and the patients save billions of dollars.

Making precise decisions about a treatment regime can result in less recurrence of the same disease and so less revisit to the hospital for the patient.

By analyzing clinical data, doctors can remove any unnecessary medication or operating procedure. This can lower the treatment cost and the time period for treating other patients. The patient can also utilize the data by doing research on their own.

For example, you can check the role of regular exercise in chronic disease management and decide whether to go to a hospital, or you can make yourself feel healed by exercising.

Although it is always better to inform your physician about any changes in your medication system, the accumulated data will provide you with a possible or effective alternative solution for oral medication or operation.

● Take Preventive Strategies for Pandemic

Clinical data stored in one place is highly valuable not only for present-day analysis but also for identifying future trends in certain diseases.

By analyzing the characteristics of a certain disease, researchers can predict upcoming epidemics related to the disease-causing virus or bacteria.

Again, a man in California can suffer from flu-like symptoms. After a few days of being hospitalized, he started showing hidden symptoms, such as high fever or skin rash. Attending physicians can analyze previous data to figure out any similar disease-causing symptoms.

If physicians find any similar disease, they can treat him with the same effective medication physicians used before to cure him.

On the other hand, in the worst-case scenario, the doctors may find the disease symptoms are similar to a pandemic or epidemic that can spread quickly inside a community.

In that case, physicians can inform the authorities, and they can take preventive action. Such as quarantine or wearing protective clothes. At present, the healthcare system is related to a few organizations. Although

● Effective Marketing Strategies

The healthcare system today is related to a few organizations. Although patients rely on governmental or private organizations for treatment, doctors need medical equipment, medication, and diagnostic tools to treat patients. Therefore, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurance providers, and government entities are all a part of the healthcare system.

Interconnecting all these organizations is presumably difficult for any healthcare institution. Moreover, continuity of communication between these sectors is also important.

Since collecting patient data can help maintain the organizational strategies inside a hospital, it can also assist in upgrading the service and overall score comparable to other hospitals.

An institution can come up with an effective marketing strategy to communicate more medication with pharmaceuticals and more diagnostics equipment from suppliers.

By doing so, the healthcare service in a hospital will improve. Moreover, suppliers and pharmaceutical companies can use their marketing strategy to manufacture more products to meet the needs of the growing market.

7. Proper Knowledge of Clinical Research

Clinical data collection includes collecting data about clinical trials of a new drug. A clinical trial refers to the research method in which healthy or diseased volunteers participate in the trial of a newly developed drug.

Researchers perform clinical trials after many animal or computerized simulation trials to ensure the efficacy and lethality of the drug component.

Clinical trial data comes in handy for physicians who attempt to try the new drug on patients. The data helps the caregiver estimate the appropriate dose and frequency of intake.

Scopes of Collecting Clinical Data

Collecting clinical data with pen and paper through surveys is still in practice because digitalization in rural areas may not have been established in many developing countries. However, collecting data and analyzing it with electronic gadgets has made data collection smooth, quick, and accurate.

Here are a few ways you can collect clinical data for your next project or your organization.

● Wearable Device

Although it seems futuristic and a concept from sci-fi movies, it is a modern day invention to extract data using a wearable device directly. Such devices are capable of detecting symptoms and relaying them to the physician so that they can take preventive initiative for the patient.

These devices help emergency patients who need the constant attention of medical personnel. The device can alert the designated personnel if the patient’s condition deteriorates and emergency medical care is needed.

● Telemedicine

Using telecommunication to collect clinical data or provide medical services is blooming nowadays. Although researchers have been using telephones to collect data for decades, new and advanced approaches have emerged with the help of smartphones.

Physicians and patients can use applications to exchange treatment-related information, which ultimately reduces treatment costs with less frequent doctor visits.

● Social Media Survey

The power of social media is undeniable. And clinical data collection with the help of social media has potential. Even though there are chances that people may provide false information, you can still approach this method if you wish to reach a good number of people in a short time.

Conclusion:

We are hoping that this article helped you to find the answer of – why is clinical data collection important?

From improved patient care, marketing strategy to implementing AI in the healthcare system, clinical data collection in one storage will assist in growth in every sector. However, all you have to do is find the right way to collect precise data.