(Author: Roland Rashleigh-Berry
Date: 02 May 2008)
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Obvious candidates for adding to the sasautos library are the very useful function calls used in SCL for extracting variable and data set information. In SCL you need to open the data set and give it a file handle before you can get this information but it is easy enough to write this code into a macro in a way that the whole macro behaves like a macro function. I have used this technique for many of the sasautos extension macros. This is not at all efficient when you are making many of these calls, because the data sets are being opened and closed multiple times when once would have been better, but when you are developing more complex macros, such as I have done for some clinical reporting macros, then the convenience outweighs the efficiency considerations.
Since 1987 I have been building up my collection of low-level, general-purpose utility macros. Every time I have spotted the need for one, I have written one. I have asked many other people to tell me what macros would be useful and created them if I could see a need. The result is that my collection of macros is very comprehensive and the number of them stands at over 150. If you ever think of a macro, the chances are that it is already in my macro collection. I would put that probability at higher than 95% so my collection is a very good place to start looking if you are thinking you need a macro to do something general-purpose and low-level, especially in the field of clinical reporting. You can get to these sasautos extension macros and their descriptions by clicking on this link.
All the macros can be downloaded as a zip file here.
The patient profiler described in the article is similar in parts to the PPD
Patient Profiles.
PPD Patient Profiles
I have written an entirely independent version of a graphical patient profiler, inspired by Ya Huang's creation, which I thought was a brilliant design achievement. I have put a lot of man-hours of my free time into this as I consider it to be a very important enhancement to the clinical trials process. Clinicians, who follow the progress of clinical trials, will know about the serious adverse events and the successes. They will probably find this out via telephone calls or faxes because the data from the clinical trial will be "unclean". Indeed, I have had access to this unclean data from many clinical trials and it is truly unclean, even with wrong years for events. It takes months to sort out the irregularities. But there is a lot of useful data in there that could be used for the benefit of patient safety. If the clinician had access to the data and could visualise the situation, they could, perhaps, spot danger-signals for patients on the trial, based on the profile of patients who have already withdrawn from the trial or patients who had suffered drug-related adverse events. If the data were clean enough to use, and the patient profiling software were good enough and flexible enough, then perhaps potential problems could be spotted in advance, much to the benefit of patient safety.
For these reasons stated, it is with much pride and pleasure that I have released my graphical patient profiler such that all can use it for free. It is now released as a compiled and stored macro that you can download from this web site. You can link to the patient profiler page below. Please use it and if you encounter bugs then please send me details.
Roland's Graphical Patient Profiler
If you have never written shell scripts before and your knowledge of Unix is limited then you are better off using this link.
If you already have a shell script library you use and you want to hunt for more useful tips and shell scripts then go direct to this page.
Through late 2007 and early 2008 I put a lot of work into upgrading these macros so the current documentation is not up to date. I'll be updating and moving this documentation out of the Spectre e-book and into this web site when and if time allows. This may take some time as it has now reached the stage when I must stop working on these macros due to other commitments. I now no longer support these macros for users who use them for free. As for fixing bugs, although these may get reported to me it may take me a long time to fix them. I use these macros myself and tend to fix bugs when they affect my own work. They are highly complex macros and fixing a bug can take up to 8 hours. This is time I can no longer afford. The only way I can justify this work is if users have a support contract with me.
You can download Spectre using the link at the end of this section.
What follows is the current status of Spectre that you can download.
Bugs and changes log
spectre.zip (documentation) - 16 Feb 2008
macros.zip (macros) - 02 May 2008
scripts.zip (scripts) - 29 Jul 2007
Spectre (Clinical) can be downloaded from the following page which will
also give instructions on how to set it up as an e-book.
Spectre download
E-mail the macro and web site author.
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