Visual Guide to Clinical Programming with SAS

April 07, 2009

Many user manuals and instructional books use extensive text as a way of communicating their ideas. Although this can be useful for certain topics, a visual guide can be more effective to convey and teach many technical subjects and related processes. The main purpose of user manuals is to simply be used. It is therefore not written in prose as in a fiction novel. Rather than verbose text, this chapter will present the essential steps needed to perform clinical data analysis through visual examples. It will introduce each concept by showing an image of the task and then convey related instructions through bulleted or short sentences instructing the necessary steps. This chapter is therefore intended to be used and not read. The lesson learned can be quickly translated into useful applied methods rather than contemplated upon.

The images and steps are presented in chronological order. These are the common steps that a clinical analyst would take in analyzing and generating reports. Whenever there are dependencies among the steps, it will present the header such as "Step 1" followed by the short instruction. Most steps however can be applied on their own since the analyst would need to repeat these steps repeatedly for different input data for specified analysis. You can therefore browse through any section that applies to what you are working on and use the visual cues along with the short text to perform the necessary tasks at hand.