Get Your Queries Under Control (Part 1: Query Aging)

By OpenClinica

We may all face death and taxes, as Ben Franklin quipped, but data managers are most certainly guaranteed yet a third inconvenience: queries. As long as human beings play a role in data capture, some fraction of this data will defy either explicit validation rules, common sense, or both. These entries, when left unresolved, not only create more work for monitors and coordinators, but they delay interim and final locks. And time added to a trial is cost added to a trial.

As dispiriting as this sounds, data managers employing EDC enjoy tremendous advantages in “query control” over their paper-using peers. Paper doesn’t support real-time edit checks, our most effective vaccine in the primary prevention of queries. Neither does paper allow for real-time reporting on the status of our queries. That reporting is crucial in any effort to close existing queries, reduce the number of queries triggered in the future, and shorten the amount of time queries remain open.

By itself, a long list of open queries won’t signal alarming query trends. For that, metrics are required. In a series of posts starting with this one, I’d like to offer guidance on those metrics.