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Say hello to masters of human relations
Persistence, team spirit bring together staff of 60
in Met West-based Collaborative Data Services
By Barbara Brachtl
Bruce Cummins, interviewer
for Collaborative Data Services, talks on the phone with a participant
in the PATCH study. Cummins has been a Hutch interviewer for
seven years. -- Photo by Clay Eals
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Center scientists
trying to identify environmental and genetic factors that may
contribute to cancer need information about large numbers of
people information that must be gathered one person at a time.
Which is where Collaborative Data Services
comes in.
CDS is a shared resource with a staff
of 60 people based at Metropolitan Park West. It supports 25
studies, most of them projects of the Cancer Prevention Research
Program in the Public Health Sciences Division.
Every month, CDS conducts an average
of 500 telephone interviews to screen study participants and
to gather health-related information from cancer patients, members
of their families and members of the public who serve as controls.
Every month, CDS also sends out as many
as 20,000 recruitment letters, self-administered surveys and
other study materials. When the completed surveys are returned,
they are reviewed for completeness and then entered in the appropriate
database.
As CPRP investigator Dr. Ruth Patterson
puts it, CDS is "my operational right hand in completing
projects."
CDS director Sheryl Vick says that CDS
participation in Center research projects actually begins during
the design phase, with CDS staff helping project staff develop
budgets, survey instruments, sampling schemes and data entry
and database tracking systems.
Once the study begins, CDS systematically
collects data through telephone interviews and mailed surveys.
CDS also may arrange for collection of blood and other biologic
specimens from study participants.
Key to data collection are the 20-some
telephone interviewers who conduct surveys using a Computer Assisted
Telephone Interviewing system. CATI displays survey questions
on the computer screen and allows interviewers to enter participant
responses question-by-question as the interview proceeds.
CDS interviewers must be patient, persistent
people. For every call that ends in a completed interview, they
make an average of seven attempts.
"It can be difficult to reach people,"
says CDS field operations supervisor Sarah Taylor. "Either
they're not at home or they may have some sort of screening device.
But especially for cancer cases, we'll call 50 times if we have
reason to think we'll get that person."
Interviewers must also be masters of
human relations.
Sheryl Vick
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CDS isn't doing any random-digit
"cold" calling a letter requesting participation precedes
each call but sometimes it takes a bit of talking to get people
to participate in an interview that could take 10 minutes to
an hour and involve personal questions about their lives and
health.
Taylor confirms that while response
rates vary across projects, only about 10 percent of the cancer
patients and family members contacted refuse to be interviewed,
while perhaps 15 to 18 percent of the people sought as controls
decline participation.
Dr. Polly Newcomb, member in the Cancer
Prevention Research Program (CPRP), says CDS's interviewing staff
achieves a considerably higher participation rate than many such
groups elsewhere, "which is critical when you're doing epidemiological
research. We're confident that our study results are more valid
because of the excellent work they do."
Although the bulk of CDS' work is helping
to plan cancer research studies, collecting study data and preparing
it for analysis, CDS does a number of other things as well.
For example, CDS has conducted Center
staff surveys regarding the online staff directory, mentoring
and career advancement for women, and quality of graduate and
postdoctoral students' experience at the Hutch.
For one Center study the Seattle Gastrointestinal
Program Project CDS programmers developed a sophisticated tracking
system for biological samples that must be transferred across
many labs and clinics.
CDS traces its beginnings to a subsection
of CPRP formed in 1989. That group evolved into two groups: CDS
(known as Evaluation Shared Resource until a year ago) and Nutrition
Assessment Shared Resource. In 1998, CDS became a stand-alone
shared resource.
Newcomb says she particularly values
CDS because she also does research at the University of Wisconsin,
where there is no such shared resource and she must handle all
of the tasks CDS handles at the Hutch within her own research
group.
"There's a great economy of scale
by having that expertise in-house that you can share," she
says. "Much of what they do is similar across studies, so
we are able to benefit from other investigators' experience.
CDS is good at customizing existing programs and protocols for
new studies, so studies can get into the field in a timely, cost-effective
manner."
Patterson, too, values CDS. "I'm
free to concentrate on the scientific aspects of my work because
CDS managers and staff have a real appreciation for scientific
objectives of my projects and consistently demonstrate a commitment
to the highest level of accuracy."
To learn more about CDS, call Vick at
Ext. 5622.
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