Adapting data management education to support clinical research projects in an academic medical center

Abstract:  Background

Librarians and researchers alike have long identified research data management (RDM) training as a need in biomedical research. Despite the wealth of libraries offering RDM education to their communities, clinical research is an area that has not been targeted. Clinical RDM (CRDM) is seen by its community as an essential part of the research process where established guidelines exist, yet educational initiatives in this area are unknown.

Case Presentation

Leveraging my academic library’s experience supporting CRDM through informationist grants and REDCap training in our medical center, I developed a 1.5 hour CRDM workshop. This workshop was designed to use established CRDM guidelines in clinical research and address common questions asked by our community through the library’s existing data support program. The workshop was offered to the entire medical center 4 times between November 2017 and July 2018. This case study describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of this workshop.

Conclusions

The 4 workshops were well attended and well received by the medical center community, with 99% stating that they would recommend the class to others and 98% stating that they would use what they learned in their work. Attendees also articulated how they would implement the main competencies they learned from the workshop into their work. For the library, the effort to support CRDM has led to the coordination of a larger institutional collaborative training series to educate researchers on best practices with data, as well as the formation of institution-wide policy groups to address researcher challenges with CRDM, data transfer, and data sharing.