spiesruan/TrialRecruitmentTool

A tool to support the planning and monitoring of recruitment for clinical trials. Copyright © 2020 Stellenbosch University and South African Medical Research Council. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA. For more information please contact the SAMRC at info.ship@mrc.ac.za. # Trial Recruitment Tool ## Background In a novel partnership between clinical trial investigators of the South African Medical Research Council and industrial engineers from the Stellenbosch University Health Systems Engineering and Innovation Hub, we developed a Trial Recruitment Tool (TRT). The objective of the tool is to serve as a computerised decisions-support system to aid the planning and management phases of the trial recruitment process. The tool was developed for the direct application environment and has since been modified to provide flexibility for possible further application. ## Repo Contents This repo contains four folders as described below: **0. Packages Installation** - The installations required to run the tool **1. Trial Recruitment Tool** - The complete Trial Recruitment Tool **2. Planning Tool** - A partial Trial Recruitment Tool with only the planning component **3. Example Data** - Example data which may be used to play with the tool functionality ## Planning Component The trial recruitment planning component assists decision-making during the planning phase of a clinical trial and comprises single site and multisite planning. ### Single Site Planning The single site planning component provides a rough estimation of how long a trial or site is expected to take to recruit a specified sample size and can be deployed before exact site details are known. Specific known parameters are used by the simulation model to calculate and display the expected TRD. The initial values, which are displayed in the input areas of the TRT, are typical values that would be used for planning based on previous data. ### Multisite Planning The multisite planning component allows the expected TRD to be predicted with greater accuracy by incorporating several different sites, each with their own parameters. It allows consideration of different scenarios and facilitates planning decisions based on the information presented. Once the number of sites …