A suite of web applications to streamline the interdisciplinary collaboration in secondary data analyses

The outcomes research process can be described as a set of three interrelated phases: design and selection of data sources, analysis, and output. Each of these phases has inherent challenges that can be addressed by a group of five web applications developed by our group. QuestForm allows for the formulation of relevant and well-structured outcomes research questions; Research Manager facilitates the project management and electronic file exchange among researchers; Analysis Charts facilitate the communication of complex statistical techniques to clinicians with varying previous levels of statistical knowledge; Literature Matrices improve the efficiency of literature reviews. An outcomes research question is used to illustrate the use of the system.The system presents an alternative to streamline the interdisciplinary collaboration of clinicians, statisticians, programmers, and graduate students.In the last decade, the number of relevant data sources available for outcomes research has grown exponentially. In contrast, the number of individual researchers with clinical and statistical expertise required to explore these data sets increase at a much slower pace. As a result, an immense quantity of valuable clinical data are left untouched, never becoming clinical publications that could potentially improve health care.The disproportion between data volume and number of qualified researchers can be explained by the growing complexity involved in outcomes research projects using secondary data analyses. Researchers have to formulate of a clinically relevant and methodologically sound research question, find appropriate data sources, perform statistical analyses, and generate a final manuscript that will be submitted for peer-review. Frequently, individual researchers have the training and time to perform a few of these steps, but the integration of all tasks calls for an interdisciplinary systems approach [1,2]. This interdisciplinary effort, however, is often challeng