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Completed No phase listed Observational

Regression Discontinuity Design to Evaluate of Drotrecogin Alpha Effectiveness

ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02843685

Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02843685. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.

ClinicalTrials.gov public records Last synced Sep 12, 2026, 8:48 PM EDT

Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.

Official title

Regression Discontinuity Designs to Evaluate Real-world Effectiveness: a Case Study of Drotrecogin Alpha

Brief summary

Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.

Many health care interventions and medications found to have benefits ("efficacy") in experimental, tightly-controlled, human research trials are later found to lack real-world health benefits ("effectiveness"). Inadequate surveillance of real-world clinical effectiveness may falsely reassure clinicians and those who monitor healthcare quality, propagating unrecognized ineffective or harmful treatments at high costs to patients and society. The failure to translate potential health benefits into realized gains, or to detect unexpected harms in healthcare delivery, stems from a lack of methods with which to robustly measure real-world (in)effectiveness. Current methods to detect changes in outcomes 'before and after' implementation may be biased by secular trends in healthcare practice and outcomes; other methods to compare outcomes for treated and untreated patients may be biased by unmeasured factors. The current project aims to develop and demonstrate - as a proof-of-concept - the use of a quasi-experimental research method called 'regression discontinuity design (RDD)' in surveillance of real-world clinical effectiveness. RDD had previously found use in the evaluation of educational programs in which students scoring below a threshold were assigned an intervention. The US Department of Education considers RDD designs to have quality similar to randomized trials.

Study identification

NCT ID
NCT02843685
Recruitment status
Completed
Study type
Observational
Phase
Not listed
Lead sponsor
Boston Medical Center
Other
Enrollment
12,492 participants

Conditions and interventions

Conditions

Interventions

Drug

Eligibility (public fields only)

Age range
Not listed
Sex
All
Healthy volunteers
Healthy volunteers not accepted

This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.

Study timeline

Start date
Nov 30, 2002
Primary completion
Nov 30, 2005
Completion
Not listed
Last update posted
Jul 25, 2016

Started 2002

United States locations

U.S. sites
1
U.S. states
1
U.S. cities
1
Facility City State ZIP Site status
Boston Medical Center Boston Massachusetts 02118

Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.

About this trial record page

What this page shows
Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02843685, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
What this page does not do
No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
Where the data comes from
Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
Last refresh
Last update posted Jul 25, 2016 · Synced Sep 12, 2026

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The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT02843685 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.

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