Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile’s Dashboard

I’m proud to report that many of these dashboards are now built and have already been deployed to the SWOG website! 

They’re designed to 

• serve as tools that can help SWOG’s leadership pilot the organization, 
• help SWOG managers and staff make data-driven decisions, and 
• give SWOG members the organizational information they need to succeed. 

Our website’s first dashboard involved protocol tracking (under Member Resources), developed a number of years ago to help us see, on a single (if lengthy) page, how all of our protocols in development are progressing against the Operational Efficiency Working Group (OEWG) timeline. This dashboard remains very useful, and it is consulted widely and frequently.

But we’ve since launched our next generation of web-based dashboards – which are much more interactive, with options for slicing and dicing (yes, the parameter control widgets are literally termed “slicers”) the given data in multiple ways. These three dashboards are only a website login away – linked from the “About” menu when you are logged in to swog.org.

Committee chair protocol development dashboard 
The first of these next-generation dashboards was developed under the guidance of our protocol resourcing task force, led by Group Co-Chair-Elect Dr. Primo “Lucky” Lara. That group identified dashboards as a toolset that could help us visualize available statistical and operational resources in a way that would make it easier to allocate them transparently. The task force outlined the needed capabilities, and SWOG Chief of Administration Nathan Eriksen executed, developing a set of interactive displays of data on our committees, staff, protocols in development, and active studies, and on the interdependencies among these.

Since then, we’ve jumped wholeheartedly into the dashboard business. Last year we hired a data and business intelligence developer, Cristian Eriksen, who has since collaborated with Nathan to develop and launch two additional dashboards.

This father-son dynamic duo presented on the three next-generation dashboards, which together comprise more than 40 different interactive data views, at the fall group meeting’s general plenary session last month (the session recordings from Chicago are now online).

Publications dashboard 
The second dashboard rolled out provides an entrance into our database of more than 5,000 SWOG publications and presentations. Our researchers produce roughly 200 new resources each year to add to this database, which is meticulously maintained by SWOG Publications Manager Pat Arlauskas.

The initial publications dashboard views present aggregate data, and later ones allow us to sort publications by committee, year, study number, author, and more and to drill into the data – for example, to generate author lists for individual publications.

Several views identify which publications report primary trial results and which appeared in high-impact journals (journals with an impact factor of 10 or higher). The more recent publication records also include a link to the abstract itself or to the manuscript’s PubMed entry.

While most views display data from the last decade or so, some provide access to publications going back more than 50 years. The oldest record I saw was “Observations on the mechanism of hemorrhagic toxicity in mithramycin (NSC-24599) therapy,” from the March 1969 issue of Cancer Research, and still available online.

Finally, you can access the actual manuscript from the dashboard.

Accrual dashboard 
The newest dashboard presents data on clinical trial enrollment, with several initial views displaying aggregate data from all NCI network groups. Later views allow accruals to be sorted by type of institution, funding agency, coordinating NCTN group, study phase, and more.

You can also look into individual studies, displaying monthly accrual figures and accrual by institution. 

Several views, designed in collaboration with our DEI Leadership Council, display the demographic makeup of our trial populations, breaking out enrollment by sex, race, ethnicity, and rural vs urban location.  

There’s also a map that gives a view of the magnitude of accrual by geographic location, and there are state-level and committee-level breakdowns of enrollment by demographic factor. 

For the historically curious, some views will display enrollment data going back as far as the 1960s (it looks like 1991 was a particularly good year for accrual to SWOG studies, with more than 7,000 participants enrolled). 

All three dashboards are updated with new data several times each week, and each display has a “last data refresh” date stamp to let you know at a glance how fresh the data are. 

Interactive dashboards that give us access to key performance indicators have been a priority in our strategic plan, and I’m thrilled to see – and use – the extensive resources developed thus far. More will come. The next one, now in development, will give us better access to membership data. 

One request: these dashboards include proprietary data. Please do not share or publish them outside of SWOG.  

Once again, you can find a link to the dashboards on the “About” menu after you log in to swog.org. They’re a resource for all members – try them out and let us know what you think. You’ll find they’re not only informative, they’re also great fun to explore!