Summary
The Johns Hopkins Coursera course on Design and Interpretation of Clinical Trials provides comprehensive training in designing clinical trials, analyzing data, and interpreting results. You'll learn about trial phases, randomization, and ethical considerations. This course equips you with the skills to critically evaluate clinical trial outcomes and apply this knowledge to improve healthcare decision-making.
Johns hopkins university
Design and Interpretation of Clinical Trials
Completed: June, 2017
course description
Clinical trials are experiments designed to evaluate new interventions to prevent or treat disease in humans. The interventions evaluated can be drugs, devices (e.g., hearing aid), surgeries, behavioral interventions (e.g., smoking cessation programs), community health programs (e.g. cancer screening programs), or health delivery systems (e.g., special care units for hospital admissions). We consider clinical trial experiments because the investigators rather than the patients or their doctors select the treatment the patients receive. Results from randomized clinical trials are usually considered the highest level of evidence for determining whether a treatment is effective because trials incorporate features to ensure that the evaluation of the benefits and risks of treatments are objective and unbiased. The FDA requires that drugs or biologics (e.g., vaccines) are shown to be effective in clinical trials before they can be sold in the US.
The course will explain the basic principles for the design of randomized clinical trials and how they should be reported. In the first part of the course, students will be introduced to terminology used in clinical trials and the several common designs used for clinical trials, such as parallel and cross-over designs. We will also explain some of the mechanics of clinical trials, like randomization and blinding of treatment. In the second half of the course, we will explain how clinical trials are analyzed and interpreted. Finally, we will review the essential ethical consideration involved in conducting experiments on people.
