On average, a clinical trial generates up to three million data points. These data points provide extensive insights into the health status of study participants – they can highlight their health status, responses and potential risks, enabling researchers to monitor patient safety and efficacy continuously, as well as enable the successful advancement of therapies.

At the same time, the increasing use of mobile devices (wearables) and apps to collect patient data is leading to the data becoming more and more heterogeneous. The influx of data from multiple devices, each with different formats, frequencies and parameters, presents challenges for researchers as it can be more difficult to standardise and integrate these inputs into one cohesive dataset. This is leading to challenges with creating consistent and complete data sets.

In the UK, the government plans to introduce more wearable health technology in a bid to reform and digitise the NHS. It means more people will soon be able to monitor their blood pressure, glucose levels, and cancer treatment responses from the comfort of their own home. It also highlights that this challenge with data is only set to become more complex.

Many biopharmaceutical companies are faced with the challenge of addressing this situation in order to create a complete data set. With it, effective data management is becoming critical to the success of research, and ensuring data quality and consistency is integral.

Data workbenches play a key role here as they enable access, control, transmission, monitoring and presentation of data in dashboards. In clinical trials, a data workbench serves as a central platform that enables researchers to manage, standardise, and analyse vast amounts of data collected from multiple sources. Working as a single source of truth, it allows researchers to seamlessly merge data from diverse sources, providing a unified source for monitoring study progress, enhancing patient safety and optimising efficiency.