clinicaltrials-act-tracker | This software is designed to process a subset of trial

clinicaltrials-act-tracker is a HTML library. clinicaltrials-act-tracker has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

This software is designed to process a subset of trial registry data from ClinicalTrials.gov that are subject to FDAAA 2017, i.e. which come with a legal obligation to report results. Such trials are known as ACTs (Applicable Clinical Trials) or pACTs (probable ACTS). This subset is displayed in a website that makes tracking and reporting easier. These two commands are run daily via a fab script, and the results loaded into a staging database / website. A separate command copies new data from staging to production (following moderation). Much complex logic has been expressed in SQL, which makes it hard to read and test. This is a legacy of splitting the development between academics with the domain expertise (and who could use SQL to prototype) and software engineers. Now the project has been running for a while and new development interations are less frequent, a useful project would be as much of this logic to Python. Similarly, the only reason step (1) exists is to create a CSV which can be imported to the database. That CSV is useful in its own right for QA by our academics, but the XML and JSON artefacts are just intermediate formats that could legitimately be dropped in a refactored solution (and the CSV could be generated directly from the database). The historic reason for the XML → JSON route is because BigQuery includes a number of useful JSON functions which can be manipulated by people competent in SQL. At the time of writing, there is [an open issue] with some ideas about refactoring this process.