Dr. Michael Plankey, a clinical infectious disease Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center collaborated with staff in the Digital Scholarship & Technology Services department to develop the MACS Healthy Aging Database, a site that provides access to an electronic codebook and data request tool for researchers as well as a dissemination portal of study findings for participants. “I’m an epidemiologist, and I have an idea of how data can be stored and held, but I don’t have a lot of knowledge about information dissemination and display,” Plankey said. “The Library had the skill to make that happen for me.”
The goal in building the site is to make the data more accessible to researchers, facilitating more research using the information, and to make the research findings more accessible and understandable to study participants.
The site makes it easy for researchers to know what data is available from the sub-study and to request variables directly from the research team. The website interface allows researchers to search for variables they might be interested in, save them as a list, and then request the data for free through a cart system similar to those used in online shopping sites.
The website also serves as an information portal for study participants, who are too often overlooked in the information dissemination plans of research studies. “Dissemination is often just putting up papers,” Plankey said. “What we wanted to do is make the information easier to read and understand.” The participant portal includes several infographics created by the research team, and investigators also plan to create brief videos and other media to explain the study findings.