Building Bridges: Making Statistical Issues Accessible to the Biomedical and Translational Researcher

• Activity Number: 195
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, August 3, 2009 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Taylor Pressler*+
• Companies: The Ohio State University
• Keywords: statistical literacy ; biomedical research ; translational research ; biomedical informatics ; decision support system

Abstract

As biomedical and translational research expands, the need for effective communication between statisticians and scientists presents a major challenge. The communication issues between these two fields affect the quality of research. Research design, inferential statements and outcomes, and the use of proper statistical methodologies are all areas in which statisticians can offer expertise to further scientific research. One approach to increasing communication is to build an electronic knowledge-base describing statistical methodologies and issues that is accessible to biomedical researchers. This knowledge base also includes a decision support system that guides users to information and literature that relate to their project. The goal of this project is to design, implement, and validate a decision support system (DSS) platform that targets a gap in knowledge related to statistics.