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"With DatStat Illume, we have been able to significantly expand our research capabilities and programs and thus prevent future cancer development in young people."
–Dr. Joel Hillhouse Director, Skin Cancer Prevention Laboratory | East Tennessee State University
DatStat Illume enables 50% reduction of personnel budgets.
East Tennessee State University Skin Cancer Prevention Laboratory
Dr. Hillhouse heads the Skin Cancer Prevention Laboratory and numerous other skin cancer research projects at the East Tennessee State University Department of Psychology. Supported by grants from the American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute, Dr. Hillhouse’s findings help develop life-saving treatments and contribute vital information for cancer prevention. With a variety of ongoing projects collecting data from multiple research sites, Dr. Hillhouse needed a flexible online survey and data management tool to consolidate his data collection efforts and maximize his budget while facilitating high research standards and maintaining data security.
University projects suffer high staff turnover due to student schedules. In Dr. Hillhouse’s work, a disproportionate amount of project budgets were dedicated to recruiting and training new personnel. Project budgets were spent inefficiently, and project timelines suffered due to a reliance on an unstable workforce.
Data gathered from paper-based measures contained participants’ invalid and missing responses. Staff members inputting information into the database also risked introducing new errors into the data.
Multi-site researchers had no simple, secure way to collaborate and share information. Emailing data risked security problems while sharing data via registered mail was costly and slow.
With DatStat Illume, online participant management allows researchers to create surveys simply, invite participants via “set and forget” email jobs, and easily manage the project. Data is automatically entered and retained in the database..
DatStat Illume offers data authentication and validation to ensure that the right respondents enter valid data in the correct fashion. To reduce missing data, surveys may require critical questions. Data enters the database automatically. Once in the database, information may not be accidentally altered.
Secure, role-based data access allows appropriate research staff at multiple sites to have instant access to the right information from anywhere with an Internet connection.
Dr. Hillhouse requires far fewer personnel hours to operate his research. Personnel budgets have reduced by more than 50%. These funds may now be spent expanding his life-saving work.
Data authentication procedures allow clean, valid data to enter directly into a secure database. Having once spent approximately 25% of their time cleaning data, project staff members have been able to spend their time developing research outreach, and now survey a wider diversity of respondents.
Sharing data through a single portal, researchers collaborate securely and efficiently across multiple sites. Reducing the wait for information from a week to instantly, online data sharing eliminated time lags, overnight mailing costs, and security risks inherent to mailing data. Researchers now have instant, secure access to project surveys, data, reports and queries.
