CERTaIN: Pragmatic Clinical Trials and Healthcare Delivery Evaluations

Course Description

In this course, experts will discuss the options a researcher must consider when embarking on clinical research. What research design should I choose? How do I start the process of getting my research approved? How will I analyze the data I collect? These are all important questions that a researcher faces.

We will discuss the key decisions a researcher needs to make when preparing for and conducting research, as well as tools for data analysis. You will learn what a pragmatic clinical trial is and how to calculate power and sample size for your study. You will also be exposed to more complex study designs sometimes used in pragmatic clinical trials, such as Bayesian and adaptive designs.

This course includes the following 11 lectures:

1. Overview of Design Options for Pragmatic Clinical Trials
2. Outcome Measures in Clinical Trials
3. Non-inferiority Trials
4. Basic Analytic Methods
5. Basic Power and Sample Size Calculations
6. SMART: Adaptive Treatment Strategies
7. Introduction to Bayesian Methods
8. Bayesian Designs
9. Quasi-Experiment in Health Services Research
10. Adaptive Trial Design
11. Logistics of Clinical Trials

This course is intended for anyone interested in comparative effectiveness research (CER) and patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) methods.

This course is supported by grant number R25HS023214 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.