Text 9 Defining Clinical Research Informatics

As technology improves and better options for sharing information become available, amazing new possibilities are discovered for correlating and comparing clinical research data. Clinical research informatics is the field dedicated to helping to develop and maintain new ways for doctors, researchers, and others to create and share information which will lead them to a common goal of better treatments and further advances in medicine. A lot of work and research must go into clinical research informatics if the field is going to continue to grow and be productive, however; in order to make sure that researchers have access to the most up-to-date technologies and easy to use options, it is vital that clinical research informatics professionals are able to stay on top of new developments in computer hardware, software, networking, and communications.

What Clinical Research Informatics Is

In order to better define clinical research informatics, it helps to develop a basic understanding of exactly what is involved in clinical research informatics. At its most basic, clinical research informatics is a new way of networking researchers, laboratories, and other related individuals so that they can compile data at a faster rate while improving its accuracy as well as compare it to the findings of others as the data is being collected instead of months or sometimes years later. Through the use of telecommunications, computer hardware and software, and new technologies, these researchers can greatly reduce the amount of time that it takes to make discoveries and make the process both less expensive and more efficient.

How Clinical Research Informatics Helps Research

By allowing researchers to compare their findings with others across the country or around the world in real time, clinical research informatics can allow multiple sites to work on the same problems at once without worrying about a lag of communication causing one or more of the research sites to fall behind or be working with outdated information. New technologies have also been able to greatly increase the productivity and accuracy of clinical findings, as they have found new ways to analyze data quickly without the individual researchers having to take time away from their work in order to make sure that it is done correctly. By dividing the workload among numerous sites, researchers are able to get more done and help insure that the cures and breakthroughs of tomorrow will be coming today.

Advances in Clinical Research Informatics

A number of advances in clinical research informatics have been made which can help researchers to produce accurate data quickly and greatly reduce the workload at each research site. Breakthroughs in computer networking and telecommunications allow them to contact each other instantly and review data from other sites as it comes in, while automated software is able to take sample images or data and compare it to a control group in order to discover differences without needing any input from the researchers or others. In many cases this software can even be easily installed on home computers so that it will run and make its comparisons in the background without affecting the computer’s performance, which allows private individuals to assist with important research without having to know what they’re looking for or the more technical aspects of the research being done. This allows researchers to focus more on gathering additional information instead of having to spend inordinate amounts of time going over data that they’ve already collected.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14