No matter what field you are working in, whether it be healthcare, technology, or education, data collection is a crucial part of the success and credibility of your research. The standard way of collecting, managing, storing, and sharing this data while addressing all regulatory data security and privacy requirements is full of inefficiencies that we have grown used to. Streamlining research data collection is essential not only for speeding up the process, but also for the accuracy and quality of the results!
1. Higher Accuracy and Consistency
When data collection isn’t organized, mistakes are going to happen. Researchers can miss out on important data and make errors in interpretation when relying on outdated methods. By streamlining the process, you set up clear, standardized procedures that reduce human error and keep things consistent.
This doesn’t just apply to the researchers of the project, either. Using a physical form or a PDF can lead to survey participants guessing what format to use, or leaving important fields blank rendering their valuable input unusable. By using automated survey tools you can perfectly tailor what data you are collecting, address PHI data security and privacy concerns, and streamline participant consent form management. This helps prevent mistakes and ensures data is collected in a consistent manner from all subjects. This consistency is crucial for getting reliable, repeatable, clean results - something every good research project should strive for!
2. Saving Time and Money
Time and money are always two of the tightest resources to come by in research, and inefficient data collection is quick to slow things down and raise costs. If you're spending hours manually collecting, sorting, standardizing, normalizing, or entering data, you have less time for the important stuff that requires a real person - analyzing and interpreting your findings.
By using e-survey platforms that are integrated with data management capabilities, you can cut down on the time wasted from operational inefficiencies and spend your valuable time doing the work that really matters.
3. Easy Collaboration and Communication
Research is rarely just the effort of a single person. It usually involves diverse teams from different institutions or even countries. For collaboration to work smoothly, everyone needs access to the same, well-organized data, and emailing it back and forth just won’t cut it! To protect PHI data and comply with regulatory standards, you must have the ability to establish and enforce role-based access controls. Standard cloud data repositories are insufficient. Streamlining the collection process ensures that everyone is on the same page, with real-time updates that reduce misunderstandings or duplication of work.
Cloud-based data storage makes it easy for teams, no matter where they are, to share and access the information they need. But data sovereignty, data sharing, and data transfer considerations must also be fully considered when data collection involves multiple jurisdictions. Real-time communication and audit trail capabilities facilitate decision-making and helps projects move forward.
4. Better Data Management and Organization
Collecting the data is just one piece of the puzzle but organizing and managing it is just as important! A good process for handling data makes it easier to store, categorize, and retrieve later. Plus, it ensures compliance with legal or regulatory standards, like protecting personal information.
Using a structured data management platform can save a lot of time and effort. It ensures your data is both easy to access and secure, keeping everything on track throughout the project’s lifespan and prompting research librarians when it’s time to archive that data. myLaminin has built-in PHI and PII support, so you can easily ensure only the right people see the right information. myLaminin also has the necessary alerts, reports, and notifications to prompt PIs, Research Assistants, and Librarians of significant events and milestones.
5. Real-Time Insights and Analysis
In many fields, like clinical trials or market research, decisions need to be made quickly. Streamlining data collection means researchers can gather and analyze data on the fly, giving them real-time insights to act on. It helps researchers spot patterns or issues early, which can lead to breakthroughs that might otherwise be missed.
For example, in clinical research, patient data can be collected and shared instantly on the myLaminin platform, allowing researchers to respond quickly. In market research, businesses can gather and analyze customer feedback in real-time, making it easier to adjust strategies on the spot. No need to wait weeks or months to work with data that may be outdated by the time you get to it! More importantly, researchers can easily create categories of views of the data that can restrict access to sensitive participant information to viewers that don’t need that information.
6. Supporting Long-Term Research
Streamlining data collection isn't just helpful for the research you are working on now, it’s also vital for the future. Well-organized data is easier to revisit and build upon, which is essential for continued scientific discovery. Too often valuable data gets lost in email chains or on external devices, never to be found again.
With good data collection and management practices, future researchers can easily be granted access to your work, making it possible for discoveries to be confirmed and extended, and reducing the need for duplicate efforts. Using myLaminin’s research data management platform, you can also properly and easily archive your data and fulfill the FAIR, Open Science, and Indigenous research data sovereignty OCAP (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) principles.
One hesitation for using a new tool is often the matter of transferring your data from wherever it currently is to a new platform. myLaminin addresses this challenge by providing a historical data upload capability that allows researchers to append past results to new research.
In Conclusion
Good data collection and management isn’t just nice to have, it's essential. By improving accuracy, saving time and money, facilitating collaboration, addressing regulatory requirements, and organizing data better, researchers can focus on the things that matter - analysis of results. Technology keeps improving, and so too should the data collection and management process!
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Kian Petroskie (article author) is a myLaminin Software Engineer and has been valued team member since July 2023.
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