Frequently Asked Questions
What are your core values?
Here at EpiPath, we strongly believe that patients come first. At the end of the day, doing right by our patients is all that matters. While it may be common for individual clinicians to think in those terms when seeing their patients in the clinic or hospital, we believe this ethos should also guide our approach to designing, analyzing, reporting, and publishing basic science and clinical research studies. The time, expense, and human capital put into them, both by clinician-scientists and their patient volunteers, demand a patients-first philosophy.
Our goal is to help you realize your aspirations for your own studies. In today’s world, designing, analyzing, reporting, and publishing a typical clinical research study requires skills not only in direct patient care, but also in epidemiology, biostatistics, data visualization, medical ethics, healthcare law, and writing. Our team has what it takes to help you succeed in all of those departments.
What can your company do for me or my lab group if we are thinking of starting a study?
We are a specialty medical research consultancy. Our group provides a wide range of services customized to the specific needs of our collaborators. If you are in the nascent and early stages of a potential study—just thinking of ideas, or planning a pilot experiment or trial, for example—we can advise you on what kind of study design to adopt (e.g., case-control, case-crossover, cross-sectional, meta-analytic, prospective cohort, randomized clinical trial), as well as what kind and number of patients to recruit (e.g., targeted selection of patients, trial size, power calculations).
The ultimate success and validity of a study rests on the quality of its initial structure. The beginning stage is the best time to involve our experts, as early epidemiological and statistical consultation will ensure that you choose the appropriate study setting, participant recruitment strategy, sample selection, ascertainment of exposures and outcomes, follow up, and data collection methods. We will help you control for potential biases, confounders, and effect modifiers. We can even provide dummy data with a readymade statistical analysis plan so you can work out any kinks or problems in your systems before you begin the “real” data collection.
How can you help me or my lab group analyze our quantitative clinical data?
Our specialty is data analysis, and our goal is to help our collaborators understand their data. To do so, we take a step back to get a full understanding of a dataset’s basics before beginning any hypothesis testing. First, we help you with essential participant data reporting and general descriptive statistics. We can assist with study flow diagrams (e.g., CONSORT, MOOSE, or PRISMA) to accurately report how patients flow through each stage of a clinical study.
We can produce high quality tables to give the demographic, clinical, and social breakdown of study participants, with attention to appropriate reporting of missing data. We can summarize and create visuals to report outcomes for your study. Before beginning any hypothesis testing, we can compute summary statistics, plot histograms, create density or violin plots, and make contingency tables, so you know whether to use parametric or non-parametric tests.
When the time comes to actually test your hypotheses, we’ve got you covered. Whether you require t-tests, Mann-Whitney U tests, Kruskal-Wallis tests, chi-square tests, or Fisher’s exact tests, we know what to use. Are you working with continuous, count, categorical, or time-series data? We can advise (and implement) the right tests for any of those, too. We have expertise in linear regression, logistic regression (for calculating odds ratios), Kaplan-Meier curve creation (for survival data), Cox proportional hazards regression (for calculating hazards ratios for survival data), and machine learning (e.g., random forest).
For those performing systematic reviews and meta-analyses, we are experts in fixed and random effects meta-analysis, Bayesian meta-analysis, and meta-regression. We also have expertise in diagnostic test development and validation (e.g., calculation of sensitivity, specificity, negative and positive predictive values, and likelihood ratios according to STARD guidelines). Last, no data set is too big or too small for us. We have all of the knowledge and software necessary to get any sized job done right.
What about basic science data, or translational or genetic data (e.g., sequencing data)?
We cover that, too! Basic scientists with brilliant, deep backgrounds in biology, biochemistry, or biophysics—particularly those working with animal models—often lack opportunities to learn how to apply traditional epidemiological data analysis to their projects. This is even evident in the literature, as the editorial boards of many basic science journals lack this experience, and journals themselves are often lax in their reporting standards. This often leads to the publication of misleading or uninformative research articles. Your flies, zebrafish, mice, and rats deserve better. They deserve the same rigorous epidemiological approach applied to studies of human participants.
Regarding genetic data, we have deep experience in analysis and reporting of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data, including genome-wide association studies (GWAS). If you have Nanostring or next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, or need help interfacing with publicly available online medical databases, we can do that as well, particularly if it involves Bioconductor or other similar “big data” tools. Send us a description of your project, and we’ll tell you how we can help.
Can you help prepare manuscripts for publication?
This is one of our most common inquiries from clinicians and scientists worldwide. To begin, we help our collaborators with all stages of manuscript preparation, including picking a title that clearly indicates the study’s design; writing an abstract that provides a fair, balanced summary of what was done and found; and writing a concise introduction that clarifies the scientific background, rationale, and pre-specified hypotheses of an investigation.
We then make sure your methods provide a clear, rational, stepwise description of your study design, setting, participant recruitment, variables measured, diagnostic and outcome criteria, study size rationale, and statistical methods. We are similarly rigorous in ensuring that your results—from a basic description of your study population to detailed reporting of complex statistical tests—are perfectly reported.
Finally, we help you draw conclusions from your data to inform the writing of a clear, readable discussion. We scrutinize your methods to ensure disclosure and discourse of all potential study limitations. Furthermore, we will ensure that your study conforms to the currently accepted norms of research ethics and reporting, as required, for example, by the STROBE, PRISMA, CONSORT, STARD, and other checklists.
What if English is not our first language?
If English-language writing is not your strong suit, we will pay careful attention to word choice, economy of expression, and narrative flow to ensure direct, accurate communication of your results. Do you prefer to correspond with us in Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, or Spanish? We can do that too!
Can you provide long-term, longitudinal research or analytic support to my study or lab group?
We do indeed contract out our services to allow our research partners a longer-term relationship and continuity of workflow. If you, for example, seek to hire epidemiologists, statisticians, or science writers to work in a more permanent role on your study, e-mail or call us, and we will discuss how we can meet your needs.
I am on a tight schedule, and need help fast. How long does it take to turn a job around?
We pride ourselves on our responsiveness to our collaborators, and can often turn small or well-circumscribed jobs around in a week or less, depending on their level of complexity. Large projects may take a few to several weeks, but each job is unique, with no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of time. E-mail or call us for a free consultation and time estimate. While speed is a priority, at EpiPath thoroughness and accuracy always come first.
How much does it cost? I’ve looked through the store, but the standard packages offered don’t seem to be suited for my unique needs, or are too expensive.
We appreciate that all jobs are different, so we’re happy to give individualized quotes to interested researchers after an e-mail or phone consultation. The store prices are general guidelines and may be modified depending on a particular project’s complexity and time requirements. If you are a graduate student, postdoc, or government agency, or a researcher in a resource-limited country or setting, you can also inquire about discounted rates.
Can you help with projects not discussed above, such as grant-writing, scientific poster design, or PowerPoint design for scientific plenary sessions? What about central review of histopathologic slides or other similar specimens?
We take on jobs like these on a case-by-case basis, depending on our own level of internal interest and expertise, and whether or not such a job would meet and pass relevant institutional review board and ethical considerations. E-mail or call us for details.