The aim of the MUMC+ is that PhD candidates develop into well-equipped and capable researchers who graduate on a high-quality dissertation and have good job perspectives. To reach this, PhD candidates should receive high-quality supervision and opportunities to develop competencies that enable them to pursue a career in research, as well as outside academia.
To support PhD candidates to complete their trajectory successfully, the PhD TRACK quality and monitoring system was developed by and implemented in each of the eight research institutes. The institutes PhD coordinators and offices administer the PhD TRACK system and are contact points for both PhD candidates and supervisors.
The PhD TRACK system has the following aims:
- To register all categories of PhD candidates, their supervisors, and the research lines in which they are embedded
- To have PhD candidates build a research and teaching portfolio
- To monitor the progress of PhD trajectories
- To monitor the performance of supervisors
- To produce management information for the Schools, MUMC+ board and national organisations such as the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) and the NFU (The Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres)
For the PhD TRACK system URL of your institute, please replace fhml by the name of your institute, f.i. caphri.track.maastrichtuniversity.nl
At the start of a new project, PhD candidates receive a link by email to start using their TRACK account. The MHeNs PhD representatives have made a short introduction video on the first steps in PhD TRACK (see below).
Still, if you have any issues that come up while using it, you may contact PhD Affairs FHML/MUMC+ policy advisor or the PhD coördinator of your Institute.
What do PhD coordinators do?
The PhD coordinator informs PhD candidates about PhD regulations and procedures, policies and course opportunities. They act as low-threshold contact point in case of questions or experienced problems and support PhD candidates in finding the appropriate information or kind of support. They make sure that all PhD candidates are registered in PhD TRACK and draw up a Training & Supervision Plan and a Personal Research Plan at the start, and monitor the progress of PhD trajectories as well as well-being of PhD candidates.
The PhD coordinator is involved in all aspects and developments of the School related to PhD trajectories and advises the School Board on these matters and regularly meet their colleague PhD coordinators in the Faculty PhD Committee (FPC) and twice a year in the UM PhD coordinators meeting. They also coordinate the activities of the PhD representatives.
After you have outlined the initial ideas, MEMIC offers advice in writing your Data Management Plan (DMP). We use the web-based tool DMPMaastricht, which is based on the international DMPonline tool. DMPMaastricht is hosted by Datahub Maastricht. Functional management is provided by MEMIC.
With our 40+ years of experience in the data management field we can help you tackle questions concerning data management, standardization, IT, privacy, GDPR and security. Topics that will need to be dealt with in your DMP.
Depending on the size of your research, we will advise you on your options concerning the actual data management work. You might decide to keep this work for yourself, or decide it is better left to MEMIC.
Our consultancy is free of charge!
Ldot; safely store personal data
Conducting scientific studies can be very challenging, in particular if you take into account all relevant privacy and security related laws and guidelines. Ldot can help you with all logistics, so you can focus on your actual research data. Ldot improves the quality of your study by helping you to conduct all steps from your study protocol, whilst being compliant with laws and guidelines like GDPR and GCP.
Ldot supports the study workflow by indicating which actions should be performed for which study subject at what moment in time. Ldot can be configured to give this information in different ways: as Email notifications, Text messages, as action list and via a graphical calendar. Particularly in studies with a larger number of participants and/or studies with more complex or longitudinal schedules, Ldot can be of great help. Also in multicentre studies, the use of Ldot is recommended.
Ldot is build and maintained by our GCP qualified software developers. It is specifically designed for storing privacy sensitive information. In combination with an expanding amount of data collection tools (e.g. Castor, Qualtrics, ZorgTTP, etc.) it can keep track of your entire research flow and data collection.
More information about Ldot can be found at www.ldot.nl
Questionnaires
MEMIC facilitates different possibilities for data collection and data processing. We provide different forms of digital questionnaires and paper surveys.
Online solutions such as:
- Qualtrics;The Qualtrics Research Suite is a user-friendly, feature-rich web-based survey tool which allows users to build, distribute, and analyse online surveys, collaborate in real-time, and export data in multiple formats. Qualtrics is available to Maastricht University staff and current students. MEMIC is key-user for using Qualtrics within FHML/MUMC+. Qualtrics support is available within MEMIC.
- Castor questionnaires and eCRF; Castor adheres to Good Clinical Practice (GCP) regulations: easily build your own eCRF without programming knowledge. Export data (SPSS, CSV and more). Castor support is available within MEMIC.
- MEMIC's in house questionnaire; If you need a more complex questionnaire and custom question designs that might involve changing color sliders that show a set of different questions dependent on previous answers. With MEMIC's in house questionnaire you have all the options needed. Export data (SPSS, CSV and more). The questionnaire must be built by one of MEMIC's software developers.
Custom software
Chances you do not yet know the exact outlines of the application. Our project teams will help you clarify your needs and define the requirements of your custom application.
Custom software and apps can be an expensive investment. MEMIC maintains a codebase that helps to reduce the time and investment needed for building the custom software. Our software developers have experience in building responsive web applications and apps for Android as well as Iphone. Our developers know how to write applications that handle delicate and privacy sensitive information. We make sure the privacy sensitive data is encrypted and stored separately from the research data.
Finally, we make sure the collected data can be used by our existing software in order to bring it back to the researcher as information ready for analysis.
Data cleaning
We maintain communication with the researcher to ensure clean and reliable data.
A data cleaning plan in which we take care of your data is always drafted in close cooperation with the researcher. We understand the importance of qualitative and correct data and therefore we have a team with experience in all aspects involved.
- Combining new and existing data
- Find double input and missing input
- Cleaning of 'dirty' data
- Structuring of data
- Making data consistent according to codebooks and guidelines
All our data managers are GCP certified. This means that they are up-to-date on current legislations and guidelines in the healthcare research area.
Databases and data warehousing
We can store complex data structures in such a way that you can receive your data in a format of your choice. SPSS, CSV and more.
From the source data we create new data on which we perform cleaning and data processing operations. On these operations, we installed an audit, so that all of the steps can be reproduced. Our data can contain privacy sensitive data. In line with GCP regulations, we store personally identifiable data separately from the research data.
Main principles research database MEMIC
- Source data remains unchanged
- From source to analysis, each step is recorded
- Process is replicable
- Option to return to the source data
- Data storage in certified (ISO 27001) Oracle environment
- Privacy sensitive data is stored in a separate database from the research data
For simple surveys we can support you with online solutions such as Qualtrics. If you need a more complex questionnaire or if you need to store personal data (GCP certified), you need to consider using castor electronic data capture (edc) tooling or use MEMIC's in house questionnaire software.
With Castor you can connect to MEMIC's workflow software to keep track of your participants, to send them reminders or be notified if action is required. Castor adheres to Good Clinical Practice (GCP) regulations and has everything you need as a researcher: easily build your own eCRF without programming knowledge, multicenter support including advanced authorization management, stratified randomization, patient surveys via e-mail, import (csv) & export (csv, excel, SPSS,…) data, real-time calculations and field dependencies, much more…
With MEMIC's in house questionnaire you have all of the options castor offers, additionally you will be able to finetune each question individually. Think of complex and custom question designs that might involve changing color sliders that show a set of different questions dependent on previous answers.
Also MEMIC's questionnaire comes with our export tooling, which will allow you to easily request your research data in SPSS.
Main principles research database MEMIC
- Source data remains unchanged
- From source to analysis, each step is recorded
- Process is replicable
- Option to return to the source data
- Data storage in certified (ISO 27001) Oracle environment
- Privacy sensitive data is stored in a separate database from the research data
We can store complex data structures in such a way that you can receive your data in a format of your choice. An SPSS file being a common choice for researchers.
We store the original source data in our databases, any following steps will always be done on copies. This way it will always be possible to revert back to the original data. We also store metadata about the original data. This metadata contains information such as the types, descriptions and lengths of variables.
From the source data we create new data on which we perform cleaning and data processing operations. On these operations we installed an audit, so that all of the steps can be reproduced.
Our data can contain privacy sensitive data. In line with GCP regulations we store personally identifiable data seperately from the research data.
We maintain communication with the researcher to ensure clean and reliable data.
A data cleaning plan in which we take care of your data is always drafted in close coöperation with the researcher. We understand the importance of qualitative and correct data and therefore we have a team with experience in all aspects involved.
- Combining new and existing data
- Find double input and missing input
- Cleaning of 'dirty' data
- Structuring of data
- Making data consistent according to codebooks and guidelines
All our data managers are GCP certified. This means that they are up-to-date on current legislations and guidelines in the healthcare research area.