Adopting gtsummary at Scale: How Roche Built a Companion to gtsummary to Standardise and Simplify ARD-Based Reporting
🗓️ March 25, 2026 04:30PM - 05:00PM
Abstract
{gtsummary} is a widely used R package for creating publication-ready summary tables across diverse fields. While its flexibility supports broad adoption, organizations often require consistent formatting and domain-specific functionality to meet internal and field standards.
At Roche, we developed crane, a companion R package to gtsummary, to streamline adoption and ensure compliance with company reporting requirements. {crane} provides a Roche-specific gtsummary theme that applies standardized defaults for table appearance, as well as custom functions for creating tables too specialized to reside in the general gtsummary package. Importantly, this framework supports the production of Analysis Results Data (ARD)–based outputs
This approach lowers barriers to adoption within an organization and ensures high-quality, standardized outputs across teams. We will present the design of crane, share lessons learned from its implementation, and highlight how organizations can extend open-source tools with institution-specific functionality to balance flexibility with standardization.
Slides
Presenter
Daniel D. Sjoberg (he/him) is the Visual Analytics Lead at Genentech. Previously, he was a Lead Data Science Manager at the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium, and a Senior Biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He enjoys R package development, creating many packages available on CRAN, R-Universe, and GitHub. He’s a co-organizer of rainbowR (a community that supports, promotes and connects LGBTQ+ people who code in the R language) and of the R Medicine Conference. His research interests include adaptive methods in clinical trials, precision medicine, and predictive modeling. Daniel is the winner of the 2021 American Statistical Association (ASA) Innovation in Statistical Programming and Analytics award.