Implementing the principles and practices of good data management (DM) is essential in any health research. In comparison to other research standards such as good clinical practices (GCP) and good laboratory practices (GLP), good DM is less appreciated and supervised by investigators. This institute being a pioneer institute in Diarrhoeal research, a separate Data Management Division has been set up in October 2008 from the innovative idea of new director with view of Good Data Management practices. The aim of this division is to produce the reliable, complete, accurate data from the various health research projects and finally interpretation of research finding with proper sophisticated statistical analysis. Good DM can ensure the validity of data by setting ranges and inconsistency checks and by maintaining integrity among the data sets. The process of data validation and maintenance of the data documentation are so important, that differences in research outcome across study sites may sometimes be attributable to differences in the DM activities. In order to assure valid data, which is essential for the success of a health research project, there is essential of a good data management principles and practices in Data Management Division.

The division provides the comprehensible vision of basic research of diarrhoeal diseases empowering the epidemiological, clinical and microbiological data envisaging social, environmental and spatial implication interlinked factors are being explored by applying prompt statistical models. It has direct access to the data from all concerned division and to provide data management support including data entry/verification to various studies undertaken in this institute with International Collaborators like International Vaccine Institute, Korea, Centre for Vaccine Development, University of Maryland, Baltimore. From hospital based surveillance system on diarrhoeal diseases at infectious Diseases Hospital, Kolkata, incepted from October, 1995, a data bank has been generated on several aspects of epidemiological and clinical data. This also includes different causative etiology and antimicrobial resistance of diarrhoeal diseases. This information on causative organism and antimicrobial resistant pattern is sent on weekly basis to Infectious Disease Hospital (IDH) and different department of State Government and this information helps the physicians for proper treatment of diarrhoeal diseases. The data entry training is being given to its data entry operators and statistical package training to its data managers.

This division is capable of advanced electronic data transfer from country to country and also GIS implementation. It is capable of statistical project by collaborating the core research division like epidemiology, clinical and microbiology. It has under taken the new field of diseases control by inventing environment changes, climatic changes which are all found be high influential factor in the molecular level of diarrhoea causing organism.

It is foreseeing to conduct local and country level training for research methodology for epidemiology, clinical and laboratory studies, training on basic Bio-Statistics for health researchers, method and application of Statistical models for Epidemiological, clinical, laboratory data for medical statistician and training on software packages like Epi-info and SPSS for data analyst.