On research in clinical practice

Clinical research implies advancing current knowledge about health care by continually developing and testing new ideas about diseases, products, procedures, and strategies. Although this trait is inherent in human nature, it needs to be encouraged, nurtured, groomed, and channelized by creating a suitable atmosphere for it, providing the necessary resources, inculcating the necessary conceptual and manual skills, and rewarding the efforts and achievements suitably. Language, logic, statistics, and psychology play an important role in acquiring and developing research capability. To be socially relevant and economically viable, clinical research will need to partner with patients and their doctors in identifying what their goals of health care are, what they value, and what they are willing to "buy" in terms of goods and services. Besides, clinical research will need to bring on one platform the sponsors, the researchers, the patients, the payers, and the regulators to ensure that they do not work at cross purposes, that the cost of developing health care measures is scaled down through innovative approaches such as large simple trials, sequential trials, early marketing conditional on post-marketing surveillance, and so on. All these will be possible if day-to-day practice is slowly and systemically transformed into the largest laboratory of clinical research, which it ought to be, by forming networks of research-oriented practices, and popularizing the use of data collection and analysis tools such as Epi Info which are in the public domain

Clinical research: A personal perspective

Research ought to be inculcated as an attitude during the formative years of every health-care professional. The core elements of research are curiosity, observation, reasoning, and experimentation. These suggestions are supported with suitable examples. Medical advisers in the pharmaceutical industry are in a unique position to act as facilitators of such a process. The tools they can use are also suggested

The penumbra of randomized control trials

Pre-occupation with randomized control trials as the basis of evidence-based medicine has increasingly shadowed other study designs over the last half a century. These include surveys, case-control studies, and case-cohort studies. They have the potential to overcome several ethical and cost constraints, but depend on the embedding of research in routine practice, emphasis on relevant but limited, accurate, and complete data, harnessing of information technology for this purpose, and epidemiological and statistical literacy among clinicians. Only then will it be possible to nurture and network research-oriented practices by therapeutic areas. Given these, the alternative study designs can pave the way to regulatory reforms that will ultimately benefit the discoverers, approvers and users of health-care tools