Attitudes on Data Reuse Among Residents in an Urban Internal Medicine Program

Objectives: Secondary data analysis, or data reuse, is a topic of growing interest with professional ramifications for librarians working in data curation, management and sharing with growing relevance to clinical work due to the availability of electronic medical record data and large population level health surveillance data sets. Medical residents may provide useful insight on data reuse as they represent future clinicians, still exploring research avenues, and their views may highlight forward looking trends. In this study, we sought to understand what internal medicine residents’ attitudes were toward secondary data analysis.

Methods: We surveyed internal medicine residents in three distinct tracks (Primary Care (PC), Categorical, and Clinician-Investigator (CI)) using questions based on a 2011 NSF-supported DataOne survey [1]. While all tracks focus on clinical care, PC has a greater emphasis on ambulatory care, Categorical has a greater focus on inpatient care, and CI has a greater research focus. In discussions with residency directors and the chief resident, the term “secondary data analysis” was chosen over “data reuse” due to this being more familiar to clinicians, but examples were given to define the concept. Core domains assessed in the survey included: X, Y and Z. Survey data collected was analyzed using R version 4.0.3 and RStudio Version 1.3.1093.

Results: We surveyed a population of 162 residents, and 67 residents (41%) responded. A strong majority of residents, 55 (88.7%) out of 62 who answered the data reuse questions, felt secondary data analysis is worthwhile. 49 (79.0%) out of 62 stated that residents should be trained in secondary data analysis. The PC residents, who have curricular exposure to data reuse, more strongly endorsed positive aspects of secondary data analysis, for example 61% stating disagreement with the idea that secondary data analysis is more difficult than other types of analysis, as compared with 41% for Categorical and 42% for CI.

Conclusions: The survey reflects that residents believe secondary data analysis is worthwhile and this highlights opportunities for data librarians. In particular those who have teaching roles in their residency programs may be able to leverage data curation and analysis expertise to help increase data reuse education in graduate medical education. As today’s residents become tomorrow’s clinicians, educators and researchers, libraries have an opportunity to bolster support for data curation, sharing and education, including research data management, data analysis, and data visualization.

1. Tenopir C, Allard S, Douglass K, Aydinoglu AU, Wu L, Read E, Manoff M, Frame M. Data Sharing by Scientists: Practices and Perceptions. PLOS ONE. 2011 Jun 29;6(6):e21101.