The Data Management and Biostatistics Core will support the activities of all the projects under proposal working will all the project director and all lead investigators. The support from the core will be the collection and storage of data from the field sites and their corresponding laboratory data. The development and installation of the front-end data capture screen will also be the responsibility of this team. The core will support the teams with periodic reports on the progress of their various studies to give a sense of direction of the projects. Data confidentiality will rules will be strictly enforced in the capacity of the team being the final custodian. It will also supervise field work and ensure connectivity from remote sites to the central server at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research. All projects will have dedicated access to the core team and will address any trouble shooting on the field. There will be yearly reports and the final report from this core team. It work closely with the external collaborators especially in the area of statistical modelling and sequencing to further boost its rich experience and share best practice.
This Core will be responsible for supporting data management and statistical analysis for all the projects under this proposal. This will include field as well as laboratory generated data. The team will leverage on its past and rich experience to set up standards for data capture, record keeping and validation and maintenance of data quality. Existing protocols and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) will be refreshed through planned training sensitization workshops. The Core team will also set up a command center that will address all issues that are logged from the sites which will be socialized during the workshops. Quarterly appraisals will be instituted that will include sharing of reports on data collected which will give lead investigators a sense of data quality and the consistency of the report to the project for any remedial action. The Data Management and Biostatistics Core will retain and archive all data collected, maintain audit trails to track changes, and create a standardized reporting system so that data reports for all projects can be generated consistently/efficiently over the lifetime of the project. The project will be part of the new proposed centralized data collection point at the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research (NMIMR) that will employ existing server based-technologies with encryption providing secure efficient data sharing at different levels to all lead investigators. The strategy of the institute is to develop center of excellence for data management and analysis to meet the anticipated growth and expansion of research at the institute. The transfer of expertise such as the mathematical and statistical modelling from the external collaborators is another opportunity offered from this project.
