Medical research viewed in a new light

“The project extremely benefits from the very experienced and efficient team at Karakun. I was impressed how quickly the team set up the HIBU platform and how easily and flexibly the platform was configured to meet the specific requirements of the medical domain. All this gave LIGHTS a real boost.”

Dr. Stefan Schandelmaier, Project lead

For every clinical trial, researchers have to make decisions about methodologies. Suitable methodological guidelines are available in popular medical databases such as MEDLINE, but they are hard to find even for experienced researchers. As a consequence, researchers unnecessarily waste time on inefficient searches for methodological guidelines and, moreover, they only find a fraction of relevant publications. But what has all this to do with Karakun and its HIBU platform?

Studies suggest that a substantial proportion of clinical trials produce unusable results due to bad methodological decisions. Such decisions may concern study design, study size, study duration, investigation of causal relations, or presentation of the results. These shortcomings could be avoided as documents guiding such decisions are generally available.

Karakun is supporting a research group at the Institute for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Basel (Switzerland) that addresses this problem. To this end, the group created the “Library of Guidance for Health Scientists” (LIGHTS). Managed by Dr. Stefan Schandelmaier, this international project aims to develop a publicly available and continuously updated database, with a user-friendly search interface that is optimized for medical researchers and methodology consultants. 

The database is compiled and maintained by the LIGHTS team by means of complex and systematical assessments of published methodological guidelines. It contains publicly available documents as well as those that are not easy to access, along with a comprehensive set of metadata. From LIGHTS search results, users are redirected to the original web sources where they can obtain the full documents if needed.

The search solution tailored to the specific needs of researchers is provided by Karakun’s HIBU platform. Intelligent search and navigation tools enable users to find suitable methodological guidelines very efficiently. What is particularly helpful here is the possibility to combine various specialist search filters. As HIBU only needs minimum configuration and integration efforts, Karakun experts were able to provide a full-fledged full-text search with tailor-made search filters in a matter of days. To facilitate data maintenance, Karakun developed a special adapter that automatically integrates new documents from a cloud storage into the search solution.

Currently, the prototype comprises about 650 publications. The number of documents will be permanently extended by the international LIGHTS team. In the future, members of the research community will also be able to add publications. As a medium-term goal, the LIGHTS team plans to establish the new platform as the standard reference for methodological guidelines. Karakun grants the project a free research license of the HIBU platform and helps actively to extend and improve the solution.

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