Auditing clinical research data: objectives, applications and results

Formal auditing of clinical research data has become a standard contemporary practice within the pharmaceutical industry. Its basic purpose is to provide documentation relevant to an assessment of the quality and integrity of data collected in the course of a clinical trial. This paper outlines the audit procedures developed within one major pharmaceutical firm. These procedures require an intensive investigation of internal and external aspects of study management, records management, data entry, data analysis and statistical report preparation. A qualitative evaluation of the results achieved by this auditing procedure are presented.