 |
 |
In case you need a friendly reminder, full details of next week’s RSS Merseyside meeting can be found below. Additionally, registration is now open for the RSS Merseyside meeting scheduled for the 21st January on Statistical Methods for e-Health with Peter Diggle. Details of this meeting can also be found below. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 10th December 2013, 15.00 at the University of Liverpool Poor Recruitment in Trials Room 406/406a, Brodie Tower, University of Liverpool 15:00-16:00 Erik Von Elm (Senior Epidemiologist, Institute for Social and Preventative Medicine, University Hospital Lausanne, Switzerland & Co-Director of Cochrane Switzerland) Trial Discontinuation Due to Poor Recruitment - Can statisticians help? Discontinuation of trials often represents a waste of scarce research resources and raises ethical concerns. The single most important reason for trial discontinuation is problems with recruitment of participants. In the first part of my talk I will present recent empirical evidence on trial discontinuation from the DISCO study, a cohort of about 1000 trials in Switzerland, Germany, and Canada. This study identified trial characteristics associated with discontinuation due to poor recruitment and non-publication of trials. In the second part I will discuss approaches to statistical modelling of trial recruitment and to establish criteria to identify trials at risk of recruitment problems at an early stage. 16:00-16:30 Coffee ALL ARE WELCOME. To ensure we provide sufficient tea & coffee, please register for this event at https://sites.google.com/site/rssmerseyside/research-meetings/poor-recruitment/registration-form. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 21st January 2014, 14.00 at the University of Liverpool Statistical Methods for e-Health Room B-09, Whelan Building, University of Liverpool 14:00-15:00 Peter J Diggle (Medical School, Lancaster University & Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, University of Liverpool) Statistical Methods for e-Health There is a range of opinion on exactly what is meant by the term e-health. In this talk I will take it to mean a body of methodology intended to extract useful information from health-related data that is routinely acquired, often in real-time, during the operation of a health care system, rather than through specific, planned research projects. My impression is that large, and rapidly increasing, amounts of such data are acquired and stored for possible future retrieval, but all-too-seldom analysed. Also, these data are often temporally and/or spatially referenced and can thereby be linked to other electronically accessible data-sets such as census records, consumer purchasing patterns or social media activity. In this talk, I will argue that current research on statistical modelling of spatially and/or temporally referenced data can make an important contribution to real-time analysis of e-health data, with a view to identifying underlying trends and, often more interestingly, unexpected departures from those trends. I will then describe several applications of these ideas that are in various stages of development, from completed projects to half-formulated ideas. 15:00-15:30 Coffee ALL ARE WELCOME. To ensure we provide sufficient tea & coffee, please register for this event at https://sites.google.com/site/rssmerseyside/research-meetings/e-health/register. You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to [log in to unmask], leaving the subject line blank.