Dataset Information

Assessing author willingness to enter study information into structured data templates as part of the manuscript submission process: A pilot study

ABSTRACT:

Background

Environmental health and other researchers can benefit from automated or semi-automated summaries of data within published studies as summarizing study methods and results is time and resource intensive. Automated summaries can be designed to identify and extract details of interest pertaining to the study design, population, testing agent/intervention, or outcome (etc.). Much of the data reported across existing publications lack unified structure, standardization and machine-readable formats or may be presented in complex tables which serve as barriers that impede the development of automated data extraction methodologies. As full automation of data extraction seems unlikely soon, encouraging investigators to submit structured summaries of methods and results in standardized formats with meta-data tagging of content may be of value during the publication process. This would produce machine-readable content to facilitate automated data extraction, establish sharable data repositories, help make research data FAIR, and could improve reporting quality.

Objectives

A pilot study was conducted to assess the feasibility of asking participants to summarize study methods and results using a structured, web-based data extraction model as a potential workflow that could be implemented during the manuscript submission process.

Methods

Eight participants entered study details and data into the Health Assessment Workplace Collaborative (HAWC). Participants were surveyed after the extraction exercise to ascertain 1) whether this extraction exercise will impact their conducting and reporting of future research, 2) the ease of data extraction, including which fields were easiest and relatively more problematic to extract and 3) the amount of time taken to perform data extractions and other related tasks. Investigators then presented participants the potential benefits of providing structured data in the format they were extracting. After this, participants were surveyed about 1) their willingness to provide structured data during the publication process and 2) whether they felt the potential application of structured data entry approaches and their implementation during the journal submission process should continue to be further explored.

Conclusions

Routine provision of structured data that summarizes key information from research studies could reduce the amount of effort required for reusing that data in the future, such as in systematic reviews or agency scientific assessments. Our pilot study suggests that directly asking authors to provide that data, via structured templates, may be a viable approach to achieving this: participants were willing to do so, and the overall process was not prohibitively arduous. We also found some support for the hypothesis that use of study templates may have halo benefits in improving the conduct and completeness of reporting of future research. While limitations in the generalizability of our findings mean that the conditions of success of templates cannot be assumed, further research into how such templates might be designed and implemented does seem to have enough chance of success that it ought to be undertaken. Data extraction; Automated data extraction; Electronic data extraction manuscript submission; Structured data; Data sharing; Natural language processing (NLP); Semantic authoring; Author opinion; Author feedback; Author willingness; Data summary; Systematic review; Study quality; Study quality reporting; Risk of bias reporting; Study evaluation; Data extraction tool; Data extraction software; Standardized data; Data templates; Author submission requirements; Machine readable; Knowledge translation; Science translation.

SUBMITTER: Wilkins A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9280381 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Electronic health record (EHR) systems have been widely adopted in hospitals. However, since current EHRs mainly focus on lowering the number of paper documents used, they have suffered from poor search function and reusability capabilities. To overcome these drawbacks, structured clinical templates have been proposed; however, they are not widely used owing to the inconvenience of data entry. OBJECTIVE:This study aims to verify the usability of structured templates by comparing data entry times. METHODS:A Korean tertiary hospital has implemented structured clinical templates with the modeling of clinical contents for the last 6 years. As a result, 1238 clinical content models (ie, body measurements, vital signs, and allergies) have been developed and 492 models for 13 clinical templates, including pathology reports, were applied to EHRs for clinical practice. Then, to verify the usability of the structured templates, data entry times from free-texts and four structured pathology report templates were compared using 4391 entries from structured data entry (SDE) log data and 4265 entries from free-text log data. In addition, a paper-based survey and a focus group interview were conducted with 23 participants from three different groups, including EHR developers, pathology transcriptionists, and clinical data extraction team members. RESULTS:Based on the analysis of time required for data entry, in most cases, beginner users of the structured clinical templates required at most 70.18% more time for data entry. However, as users became accustomed to the templates, they were able to enter data more quickly than via free-text entry: at least 1 minute and 23 seconds (16.8%) up to 5 minutes and 42 seconds (27.6%). Interestingly, well-designed thyroid cancer pathology reports required 14.54% less data entry time from the beginning of the SDE implementation. In the interviews and survey, we confirmed that most of the interviewees agreed on the need for structured templates. However, they were skeptical about structuring all the items included in the templates. CONCLUSIONS:The increase in initial elapsed time led users to hold a negative opinion of SDE, despite its benefits. To overcome these obstacles, it is necessary to structure the clinical templates for optimum use. In addition, user experience in terms of ease of data entry must be considered as an essential aspect in the development of structured clinical templates.