Judy Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Outcomes and Health Behaviors in the Department of Oncology, and a member of the Cancer Control Program at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. In 2010, the National Cancer Institute awarded Dr. Wang and her team a five-year multi-site research project titled " A physician-based trial to increase colorectal cancer screening in Chinese."

The overall goal of this project is to test the efficacy of a culturally-tailored office-based intervention in increasing Chinese physicians’ colorectal cancer screening recommendations to their non-adherent Chinese American patients. Given the physician’s role as an authority in Chinese culture, physician recommendation is essential to Chinese patients’ adherence to screening. Through an office-based intervention designed to improve communication skills and self-efficacy of Chinese-American physicians, the proposed project would increase their recommendation rate and non-adherent Chinese patient's CRC screening rate.

IT Requirements

Dr.Wang needed a complex, secure online survey – in Chinese - that could be administered by several associates to patients by telephone. The project data required a secure repository, with easy data export to analysis programs. Marie Kolawale of the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) division of UIS had previously developed the Secure Survey Suite application in collaboration with Dr. Mary Ann Dutton (Psychiatry), Dr. Robert Clarke (Dean of Research) and Steve Moore (ARC). Marie was able to modify the program to support Chinese characters.,

The online survey and database is now hosted on UIS’s NCS enterprise VM servers, and Dr. Wang has accumulated data for over 260 patients from 20 physician’s offices to date.

“The survey has over 130 questions, with very complex answers and skip patterns,” says ARC Director, Steve Moore, adding, “The Chinese character requirements made this an especially exciting project for us.”

Dr. Wang says ““Working with UIS and ARC is a very pleasant experience. They strive to find solutions for challenges and try their best to accommodate our needs. The survey with Chinese characters facilitates our bilingual interviewers to enter data efficiently. Data export is also easy. The best thing is that you can easily turn to them for support whenever there is an issue related to the survey such as republishing IDs for data cleaning.”