Clinical data misleading presentation

Clinical data are, at present, inevitably open to doubt, and any list of suspected drugs must become obsolete and misleading very quickly. This topic must, therefore, be followed in the periodical press and manufacturers up-to-date information. 

Misleading clinical data relates to information which is available to the clinician but its nature or presentation is such that it fails to convey the meaning intended by its original author. Data can be misleading by nature of its ... 

Whilst the underlying clinical data in an application may be representative of the author s intention it is quite possible for the system to fail at the final hurdle by presenting that data to the user in a manner which misleads a user. 

Clinical data can be absent because all or part of the system is unavailable or slow, access to it is denied, its presence it not noticed or it fails to be delivered. Clinical data can be misleading because of how it is presented, contextualised, identified or entered. Additionally information can become corrupted, fail to be communicated or the system provide inaccurate advice such that decision making is compromised. 

It is important to ensure that the graphics used in the presentation of the results of the pharmacometric analysis of clinical trial data do not lie or mislead. The way to do this is to avoid visual distortion. That is, the pharmacometrician has to ensure that the visual representation of the data is consistent with the numerical representation. This is in terms of volume, area, and so on. 

Firstly one is required to examine the extended effeets of incorrect data in the clinical record. For example, suppose that data erroneously gives the impression that a patient s diabetes was well-controlled when, in fact, this was not the case. Potentially the patient could change the manner in which they approach their condition, become lax in managing their diet or reduce their compliance with medication instructions. A record can be misleading if the underlying data is incorrect but also, and perhaps more likely, when the manner in which it is presented to the consumer is suboptimal. Patients are unlikely to be expert users of the system and translating the entire medical record into a form that facilitates safe patient interpretation is no easy task. 

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