For Health Professionals

Center for Outcomes Research

The Christiana Care Center for Outcomes Research is a research center with a dual focus on epidemiological research and analysis of outcomes—in all fields of medicine. In addition, it is a data-coordinating center for a number of large and small clinical trials in the area of cardiovascular diagnostics and therapeutics.

The Center features:

Specific expertise in the evaluation of quality of life, economic and cost-effectiveness endpoints.
Multidisciplinary approach to research with faculty including clinical researchers from the departments of Internal Medicine, Cardiology, Oncology, Traumatology of Christiana Health Care Services, and researchers from the University of Delaware.
Collaborations with investigators at other Institutions both nationally and internationally.

Mission

To promote and conduct research aimed at improving patient care and/or informing health care policy.
To provide service and education in broad areas of clinical, epidemiologic, translational, and outcomes research.

Goals

To foster and support research with the purpose of contributing to the continual evolution of evidence based medicine.
To provide epidemiologic and analytic resources to improve understanding of outcomes at Christiana Care.
To provide design, data handling and analytic resources for assisting investigators throughout the Christiana Care Health Care System.
To develop clinical, epidemiologic, translational and outcomes projects, which may be internal, industry funded or peer-reviewed.

Capabilities

Protocol conceptualization and development.
Biostatistics/Epidemiology.
- Standard descriptive and inferential statistics.
- General and generalized linear models.
- Survival analysis.
- Multivariate analysis.
- Classification and tree regression.
- Propensity score methods.
- Bayesian analysis.
- Multiple imputation of missing data.
- Cluster analysis.
- Cost-effectiveness analysis.
Data management.
- CRF creation (Teleform®).
- Database design and programming.
  - Access front-end.
  - SQL server.
- Data entry.
  - Teleform®-verfication of 100% of the field.
  - Access hand-keyed data entry—double data entry.
- Data auditing.
  - Random sample of 10 percent of data.
  - Sample compared with the paper forms.
  - If the error > 0.1%, additional samples should be checked for data accuracy and corrected until the error falls below 0.1%.
- Reporting.
- Daily automatic back-up to an off-site server.
Data mining.

Christiana Care Center for Outcomes Research (CCOR)
4755 Ogletown-Stanton Road, Suite 2E55, Newark, DE 19718