On the Paper Chase! With Gary Chase Nurses' Health Study Senior Project Manager

Gary Chase is flanked by reams of Nurses’ Health Study questionnaires.

The perimeter of Gary Chase's office bursts with rainbow-colored file folders, while questionnaires scatter his desk. Immediately next door, in the data collection room, is a similar scene that looks more like a mailroom than the hub of one of the most influential research studies to come out of BWH.

Chase is the senior project manager of the Nurses' Health Studies, the largest and longest running investigations of factors that influence women's health, which have led to ground-breaking insights on health and disease. In the studies, participating nurses complete surveys every few months, answering questions about their lifestyle, medical history and current health.

Chase landed the role in 1987 after spending three years post-college working for a marketing research company.

"During my interview, I met with three of the senior investigators. There wasn't a conference room at the time, so we pulled chairs into a hallway where they interviewed me. Three top researchers and me in a hallway! Obviously they cared enough about this position to take the time to meet me. That was neat," recalled Chase.

The Architecture of a Question

Now, 25 years later, Chase continues to oversee a team of research data coders in sorting, counting and processing incoming questionnaires, sometimes receiving as many as 10,000 questionnaires daily.    

Asking questions, and knowing how to ask them, is where Chase shines and invests most of his time.

"Questionnaires are the basis for everything we do," said Chase. "That is where all the data comes from. You can't do research unless you have good data."

It can take nearly six months to create one questionnaire. Working with principal research investigators, Chase participates in every stage of creating the questionnaire-from layout, to ensuring that every question is clearly understood, right down to preparing the mailing envelopes. And as completed questionnaires return, Chase leads the meticulous activity of cleaning and double-checking the data. The entire process starts in June and cycles every two years between the three Nurses' Health Studies.

"My job begins with designing the questionnaire and ends when a clean data set exists and I can hand it off to the investigators so they can run their studies," said Chase. "By that time, it is two years later and we do it all over again for each study."

Full Speed Web Ahead

However, the paper chase could soon be a thing of the past, as data gathering moves to the web.

"Over the last 10 years working on Nurses' Health Study 2, we had to learn an entirely different way of collecting data because we've been pushing to have more people fill out their questionnaires on the web," said Chase.

In the current questionnaire cycle for Nurses' Health Study 2, Chase and his team received 72,000 completed questionnaires. Of these, about 53,000 were completed online.

"Not having an extra 50,000 or so questionnaires come through this office is huge in terms of saving a lot of effort and money," said Chase.

Chase is excited for the next generation of the cohort clan-Nurses' Health Study 3. Unlike its predecessors, Nurses' Health Study 3 will be exclusively online at http://www.nhs3.org/ and include a broader population of nurses.

The team is in the process of recruiting not only registered nurses, but also licensed practical nurses, nurse practitioners, vocational nurses, etc. The goal is to recruit 100,000 women. To date, about 30,000 women have enrolled.

As Chase gears up to follow the next generation of nurses, and the challenges it holds, one thing remains constant in his mind: accuracy.

"What we're doing is affecting how people live their lives and how the government sets standards," said Chase. "Also, the things that I do here with the data are at the base of what another 100 people do after I pass the data along. Their careers are dependent on taking the data that is created here and being able to trust it. Well, you can trust it because I've been holding the hand of that data since it was created." 

Gary Chase and Nurses’ Health Study administrative team.