Medical research is the backbone of various discoveries in the healthcare field. Every medication, intervention, way of treatment, care, and even aftercare in healthcare results from successful medical research. However, medical research can be revolutionary only when it’s high quality and well-articulated.
Numerous medical research projects are underway today, but not all contribute to improving health because of their inferior quality. Fortunately, you can undertake quality medical research through the following tips and practices:
Use Controlled Terminology
Standardizing quality medical research is imperative for easy review and analysis by the regulator. Using controlled terminology, you systematically represent your data sets throughout the study. Essentially, the Controlled Terminology of SDTM allows you to use a piece of metadata severally on different questions in your research.
Controlled terminology specifies what the values in columns mean for every submission in your clinical research. The approved list of these terminologies is known as a coded list, and once it’s specified, you can re-use the term severally. Furthermore, with controlled terminology in your medical research, you produce quality data and results that you can share easily without confusion.
Set Measurable and Concrete Goals
Depending on your research area, you must have concrete and measurable goals. You’re more likely to get accurate and quality data with a precise and quantitative plan. Specify the research question and think about how it’ll improve health. Stay on course with the goals to ensure you don’t collect the necessary data. Your aim should be patient-centered and efficient.
Have a Practical Plan
Without a well thought and practical plan, your medical research can have many errors. That’s why it’s best to establish an achievable plan to accomplish all your research goals effectively and on time. It includes protocols and measures for attaining the set goals and an organized system to track your measurements and data. Also, consider having a quality improvement plan for your medical research that the project manager executes.
Find Other Researchers and Collaborate
Today you can view hospital data and trends using some websites. Check this data and note the researchers who have excelled in your research area. You can find out more about them in literature and online. Reach out and find out if you can learn from their quality improvement programs. You’re more likely to perform well-detailed and superior-quality medical research through collaboration.
Have a Balanced Team
Medical research encompasses different aspects. To ensure quality is maintained, you should have a balanced and effective team with members from various backgrounds and other skills and experience levels.
Your group can have a senior leader to offer advice, provide oversight, and advocate for the team, an expert clinician to help with informed clinical decisions, and a project manager to keep you on track in accomplishing everyday tasks. With a balanced team, the many aspects of your medical research, such as project management and clinical trials, are covered, leaving no room for error.
Communicate the Goals and Progress
Once your goals are set and your teams start their projects, you must ensure continuous communication between yourselves and the organization. Please share your milestones and setbacks in the research process. With constant contact, your data is in sync, and there’s minimal room for error.
Completely Specify the Research Methodology
Your medical research can only succeed when you execute a suitable methodology correctly. You must select the appropriate setting to bring forth the correct answers to your research question. It can be a clinic, community, or laboratory. Have suitable patients or subjects by adopting a procedure that offers unbiased selection and determines the sample size that would get the results you’re aiming for.
Come up with a suitable design for allocating the patients keeping in mind any confounding factors. For greater accuracy, use data collection tools that have established reliability and validity. The data collected should be complete and correct as much as possible. Finally, use the suitable statistical analysis method considering the research objectives and data type.
Have Evidence-Based Results
For quality medical research, you must ensure that all the results you give are exclusively retrieved from the data you have without attributing any of your outside opinions. Please focus on the research question and perform the required analysis on outliers, interactions, missing values, and confounders to minimize their impact on your final result.
Have the correct type of illustrations and tables to improve the understanding of the result. Also, try to detect mistakes that can affect your findings and evaluate your findings’ internal and external validity.
Conclusion
Fallacies and errors in medical research can endanger the health of many people if not caught early. You must scrutinize your medical research intensively to ensure that whatever you state is valid and reproducible. Erroneous research might be a waste of resources. You’re responsible for producing high-quality research that can help improve health. Follow the tips outlined to enhance the quality of your medical research.
