The purpose
and scope of the SAS Clinical Standards Toolkit can best be described
by considering the product name.
SAS Clinical Standards
Toolkit focuses primarily on supporting clinical research activities.
These activities involve the discovery and development of new pharmaceutical
and biotechnology products and medical devices. These activities occur
from project initiation through product submission and throughout
the full product lifecycle. They do not include non-research patient
records or health-care, pharmacy, hospital, and insurance electronic
records.
SAS Clinical Standards
Toolkit initially focuses on standards defined by the Clinical Data
Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC). CDISC is a global, open,
multidisciplinary, nonprofit organization that has established standards
to support the acquisition, exchange, submission, and archival of
clinical research data and metadata. The CDISC mission is to develop
and support global, platform-independent data standards that enable
information-system interoperability, which, in turn, improves medical
research and related areas of health care. The Toolkit is not limited
to supporting CDISC standards. In time, the SAS Clinical Standards
Toolkit will support other evolving industry-standard data models.
The Toolkit framework is designed to support the specification and
use of any user-defined standard.
The term “toolkit”
connotes a collection of tools, products, and solutions. SAS Clinical
Standards Toolkit provides a set of standards and functionality that
will evolve and grow with future product updates and releases. Customer
requirements and expectations of Toolkit will play a key role in the
deciding what functionality to provide in future releases.