Historically, Clinical Trial Statisticians and Programmers working in the Pharmaceutical Industry have used SAS as the primary analytical software. However R is quickly gaining popularity within the industry due to it being a very powerful object-oriented language, and able to produce analyses and high quality graphics. It can be used for high performance computing and allows easy integration with other software. Many Clinical Trial Statisticians and Programmers want to increase their proficiency in R due to these benefits. PSI (Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry) is a professional organisation which aims to support its members throughout their careers, including delivering training courses. R programming is a key training topic as many members have little to no experience in R.

Pre COVID, all PSI courses were held face-to-face. If delegates were facing difficulties in the workshops, the presenter would be able to look at the delegates laptop directly and check the set up. In the last 18 months, all training courses have had to switch to virtual platforms. This means it becomes a lot harder to “look over the shoulder” of a delegate who is stuck on an exercise. Using RStudio Cloud enables PSI to run high quality professional virtual training courses. The platform ensures that everyone is working on the same version of R, all packages are installed correctly, and delegates can easily access the course content and example code.

This means PSI is able to ensure that its members are trained on these essential R skills and keep up to date with trends of the pharmaceutical industry.