SCTO develops three new tools for clinical research

In line with the Swiss Clinical Trial Organisation’s (SCTO) primary objective to catalyse valuable, innovative, and visible clinical research in Switzerland, eight thematic platforms were established in 2017. These platforms are to serve as pools of expertise. Each platform consists of a team with expertise, skills, and knowledge related to one key aspect of clinical research. They ensure crosscutting networking and act as incubators of innovation. Their members aim to not only provide leadership and to share resources, but also to inspire one another, revitalise their fields, and keep apace with trends and best practices.

After three years of intensive and solid groundwork, the platform members present their projects and tools such as:

Tool #1: Sharing data from clinical research projects: Guidance from the CTU Network

The Statistics and Methodology Platform, in collaboration with the Data Management Platform, has developed guidelines for sharing clinical research data that take into consideration the national context in Switzerland. The guidelines have been published as a concept paper in progress, which is accessible on a public repository as a preprint for external review. ECRIN member countries’, experts too, are invited to read the concept paper and leave a comment at www.preprints.org.

Tool #2: Monitoring Visit Report and Monitoring Plan: Convenient and clearly structured templates
The user-friendly Monitoring Visit Report and Monitoring Plan templates were developed by the SCTO’s Monitoring Platform to harmonise the documentation of monitoring visits and monitoring plans. This is particularly helpful for multicentre studies. The templates are available on the Monitoring Platform’s website: Because they are freely accessible, please follow the general instructions on the templates’ cover pages.

Tool #3: R code libraries for the clinical data management system secuTrial®
The magnitude of data being processed in the clinical context is ever increasing, and thus automated routines and algorithms are needed that allow efficient processing and analysis. The publicly available R statistics packages, developed by members of the Statistics and Methodology Platform and the Data Management Platform, simplifies working with secuTrial® data exports.
The released R statistics package secuTrial® is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), Github, and Anaconda Cloud.