To overcome differences in study design, data must be contributed to the WWARN Data Repository on individual patients. Ideally, all studies will follow patients for a minimum of 28 days after treatment to allow comparison of treatment outcomes across studies. For more information, see our Malaria Journal paper.

High security measures ensure that individual data files will be accessible only to the original contributor, unless the contributor chooses to share their data with others through our secure system. For more information on the treatment of contributed data, see Contributing Data.

The Clinical Module accepts datasets that were used for analysis of antimalarial drug efficacy trial or routine surveillance. To help generate identical results, the Clinical Module prefers to use the same cleaned datasets that were used for the statistical analysis. They are usually in the format of a statistical package (Stata, SPSS, Epi Info or SAS). However, other formats are also accepted. Your data contribution should be accompanied by a data dictionary that explains the variables and coding — an essential tool for interpreting the study data.  Variables required for each submission include the following:

• Unique patient identifier (anonymised)
• Date of inclusion and days or dates of follow up visits
• Treatment received
• Patient age or date of birth
• Parasitemia and species on day 0 and during follow up
• Temperature on day 0 and during follow up
• Result of any PCR genotyping (if available)
• Basic information on study site and study design

These variables will be used to derive six core variables that define efficacy outcomes according to the WHO guidelines for the assessment and monitoring of antimalarial drug efficacy. In this way, all studies presented on the WWARN Explorer visualisation tool will have had outcomes derived using the same statistical method, increasing comparability across studies.

The six core variables that allow for the generation of efficacy estimates by survival analysis are:

• Treatment received
• Initial Plasmodium species of infection
• Plasmodium species on last day of follow up
• Last day of follow up
• Derived outcome
• Result of any PCR genotyping