Mithras Research methods · 8 field notes
Research methods
Cohorts, registries, real-world evidence, recruitment: how chronic-disease research actually gets done — and where the bottlenecks are that consented, well-governed patient data can break.
8 of 50 field notes · Research methods · plain language
The journal holds 50 field notes across 7 sections: Patient rights (8), Privacy & de-identification (8), Standards & interoperability (8), Regulation worldwide (8), Research methods (8), Chronic conditions (6), Principles (4). You are viewing the Research methods section.
Real-world evidence: when routine care data becomes research
What real-world evidence (RWE) is, how it differs from real-world data, what the FDA framework permits, and where routine care data beats or trails trials.
№ 10 Research methodsDecentralized clinical trials: research that comes to the patient
What decentralized clinical trials are, how eConsent, wearables, and home visits work, and why chronic-disease patients stand to gain the most.
№ 20 Research methodsPatient registries: the quiet workhorses of chronic-disease research
What a patient registry is, the three jobs registries do, why rare-disease communities depend on them, and why the infrastructure should be shared, not rebuilt.
№ 25 Research methodsGarbage in, garbage out: data quality in health research
Why EHR data goes wrong, how the Kahn framework names quality problems, and how health research checks completeness, plausibility, and conformance.
№ 03 Research methodsWhy most clinical trials miss enrollment deadlines — and what fixes it
Why clinical trial recruitment fails so often, what the enrollment funnel wastes, and how consented, phenotyped patient data turns recruiting into matching.
№ 36 Research methodsAI in clinical research: assist with discovery, never decide alone
Where AI helps clinical research — cohort discovery, coding messy text — why decisions need deterministic engines, and how local models protect privacy.
№ 41 Research methodsWhat is a research cohort? From question to dataset
What a cohort is in research, how inclusion criteria, index dates, and washout windows turn a plain question into a dataset, and where the gates belong.
№ 46 Research methodsSynthetic health data: promise, limits, and honest uses
What synthetic health data is, its honest uses in software testing, demos, and education, and why generating synthetic data is never a consent bypass.