In recent years, industry groups have been exploring ways to reduce medical research costs by making the routine parts of research more routine.  One of the more successful attempts, now strongly encouraged by FDA, has been the CDISC standards. These standards encompass standard ways to describe the data collected and used in clinical trials and standard starting points for data that are routinely collected in most trials.  Rho staff have helped lead this trend, serving on teams developing the CDISC standards since before CDISC was an independent organization.  Rho has been using various versions of SDTM and ADaM for clinical and analysis datasets for nearly a decade, adopting these as formal standards a few years ago.  We are now taking this one step further by adopting CDASH, an industry-standard approach to data management forms, as our formal standard.

Adoption of CDASH will allow us to provide the same level of quality in data management services, faster, and in many cases, at a lower cost than was previously possible.  CDASH provides a global library of standard case report forms (CRFs) that can be used as a starting point for any study.  Use of these forms eliminates the upfront design work of creating common forms and allows for easier data transfer and collaboration later on.    CEO Russ Helms stated “As a company committed to innovation and customer service, Rho’s adoption of the CDASH standard was a logical step.  It allows us to be more efficient internally while providing faster results for our customers at equal or lower cost.”