When there is one topic, which is really hot, it's causal inference. I've got in contact with it about 20 years ago when analysing observational studies and when nobody working on clinical trials would consider it. But now - after the introduction of the estimands framework - this becomes part of every statisticians toolkit. Today, we have one of the world leading experts in this field as a guest - Miguel Hernan. I'm talking with him about:

How can this help generate and analyze data to identify better strategies for the treatment and prevention of both infectious and noninfectious diseases?

The guest in this episode represents the sponsor of this show – Nigel Howitt – current chair of PSI.

In the modern workplace, conflict has become a difficult topic. After all, conflict is antithetical to teamwork, employee engagement, and a positive company culture. Or is it?

"No" is a sign of conflict and many avoid saying it by all means. But...

Why is saying no so hard?
How do we say no in the right way?
When should we say no?

Subgroup analyses in combination with data visualisation is one of the hottest topics I can think about. And it hits us as statisticians during our careers again and again.

We need to understand subgroups for efficacy reasons and safety reasons and it's a common question in terms of how consistent your drug works across the different subgroups. It gets even more complicated if you want to review it across multiple studies.

Publishing data is great, but we also want to measure the impact our work has beyond the additional entry in our CVs. During this episode, Mike and I discuss the tools Altmetric and Dimensions. These can help us to understand the reach and influence of clinical and scientific research beyond citations. Based on these, we can track the full journey, from idea to impact. 

We touch on a number of interesting topics during the interview, including how Altmetric and Dimensions work together in uncovering this journey, but also the insights that can be gleaned from the kind of data the tools provide. 

‘I get to sit in the middle of this wonderful web with both Dimensions data and altmetric and I pull the two things together. And together, I can create these translational maps of where research is going from the laboratory through to the hospital and into the broader population.’ - Mike Taylor

We leverage Real World Evidence in many different areas and there's are many different things that can go wrong with this.

In today's episode, Rachel and I will discuss the things that we would like to have known before we started working with RWE so stay tuned to avoid mistakes we made in the past.

How do you start your week?
Do you just rely on yourself or do you use some tools to organise yourself?

learned a lot of productivity hacks from Michael Hyatt. I've listened a lot to his podcasts and I used some of his recommended tools to make my plans work such as the Full Focus Planner which is kind of a calendar and a to-do list together with goal setting tips and more.

There's a lot of community charity works we can all do but there is not a lot of work where we can maximise our impact by using our specific skills as programmers, as statisticians, and as data scientists.

What kind of leader do you want to be?
What are the leadership principles?

I learned about the concept of leadership principles from Gary Sullivan and it helped me to better understand what kind of leader I want to be.

I've been working on RWE most of my career and the clinical trial data for a while now. And 20 years ago, we would have never thought about merging them together but there's a lot of opportunities if we do this.

The recent advances in analytical methods for combining evidence from RCTs and non-RCTs, and the development of new frameworks for the inclusion of RWE in HTA have provided a greater insight on how issues around RWE uncertainty can be dealt with when estimating treatment effects for new technologies.