Are you curious about why and how I started The Effective Statistician?
What's in it for you?
Why I'm passionate about it?

Are you a sponsor who is seeking joint scientific advice from a regulatory agency and from an HTA body?

If yes, this episode is for you. This presentation replicates the discussions which may go on during scientific advice. The example was in Respiratory. This roleplay is played by David Wright, Oliver Keene, Stephen Ruberg, and myself. The aim is to show a couple of discussion points and an interesting aspect that may come up with such discussions.

A lively debate followed about the differing needs of Regulatory agencies vs HTA, with the patient voice often not taking centre stage.

As statisticians, we work in cross-functional teams, but many people, especially junior people prefer to follow rather than to lead - and that's okay. Ask yourself:

Do you always take the position of the follower or a leader?
Do you need to train yourself to lead?
Are you seen as an implementer?
Do you have goals for your project?

A lot of statisticians, especially in pharmaceutical companies but also CROs, fear outsourcing because it might make their job redundant. Think about:

What can you do about it?
How can you add value to your organisation?
What would it cost to outsource your organisation?
If you would need to compete with other organisations, would you survive?

Storytelling allows businesses to better understand insight.

Data visualization is a great tool to help share, or tell a story, but relies on the story being written first. Improved data communication comes from combining good visualization with a well-written narrative.

There's a lot to learn to be a good data storyteller.

Today, I’m talking with Kat about:
- What do you understand by storytelling with data?
- Why is it important?
- Which role should statisticians play?
- What skills do statisticians need for this?
- Where to learn these skills?

There is an endless list of things that can go wrong in sponsor-CRO relations. I’m pretty sure you have been in painful discussions about this. Have you felt a lot of frustrations on both ends?

If yes, this episode is for you. We’re sharing interesting insights here as Benjamin works for a CRO and I work for the sponsor side. We will be giving you a lot of insights on what to do and what not to do, and how to make the collaboration between a sponsor and a CRO successful.

The 2019 PSI Conference took place at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre (QEII), London, with the theme of “Data Driven Decision Making in Medical Research”.

The sessions included early phase innovative trial design, industry best practice, statistical issues in safety drug labelling, model-based dose-finding designs, an update from Transcelerate and much more.

In this series of interviews with the speakers at the conference, we talked about different topics:
- Visualization software
- Benefit risks approach
- Global statistical test for multiple endpoint analysis
- Estimands
- AE analysis using a volcano plot

Do you agree that everybody makes mistakes?
Have you had to deal with a mistake yourself, that you were really concerned about?
Were you afraid about speaking with your supervisor or your team with it?

We are all imperfect humans making mistakes. The questions are:

how do we deal with them,
what we can do about them, and
what to do to minimize them.

Processes are made to minimize mistakes and there different processes were set up to deal with mistakes and help you when mistakes occur.

Have you been sitting in boring presentations that made you start reading your emails?
Have you been listening to someone, wondering if this is for me?
Have you been getting away from a presentation and thinking 2 hours later: “what was this about?”

You’re surely don’t want your audience to feel this way, when you’re presenting yourself. You can’t be an effective statisticians without good presentation skills from my perspective. You will always need to present results, defend designs, or explain data.

Todays episode will give you insights into 7 mistakes of presentations. And honestly, I see at least one of them in nearly every presentation and I struggle with them as well – just listen to this episode and you’ll have a live example 😊.

The last PSI conference has just ended, but the timeline for a new abstract submission for the next one in Barcelone in 2020 will come up in about November 2019. Thus, it’s important to now start thinking about it.

Presenting at the PSI conference is an awesome experience. For me, PSI is by far the best conference for statisticians in the health sector as it is 100% applicable and actionable. If you’re abstract gets accepted for oral presentation or as a poster, you have a great argument for convincing your supervisor to approve the travel to Barcelona.

If you think, this is to much of a stretch, because you’re not located in Europe, just think about a different conference.

Join the challenge to submit an abstract and work together with others to overcome and roadblocks!