Clinical Reporting with R

One of the main goals of analyzing clinical data is to produce a
report. (What, you thought it was to make the world a better place?) The
R
Project has, of course, all the tools you need to perform the
statistical analysis, calculate the tables of results, and present
conclusions graphically. But how can you assemble all of that into a
report that someone can, you know, read?You could go the
cut-and-paste route: write the text in Word, export the data from R to
format the tables in Excel, dress up the saved charts in Photoshop. But
that's a complex, manual process, and manual processes can introduce
errors. Worse yet, if the data ever changes, you've got to go through
the whole process again to update the report. That means no interim
reports, and conversely, a big barrier to correcting the data and the
report after it's published.Vanderbilt Biostatistics professor
Frank Harrell has a different solution: the rreport
package for R. (See an overview slide deck here.)