Detecting Anomalies Among Practice Sites Within Multicenter Trials An Application of Transportability Methods to the TOPCAT and ACCORD BP Trials

摘要

BACKGROUND: Recent multisite trials reveal striking heterogeneities in results between trial sites. These may be because of population differences indicating different treatment benefits among different types of participants or site anomalies, such as failures to adhere to study protocols that could negatively affect study validity. We sought to determine whether a new data analysis strategy-transportability methods-could suggest site anomalies not readily identified through standard methods.