Just to show how complicated doing this can be, my own iron is very low, but my ferritin is in the doctors running in circles panicking levels. Any study has to be researched a lot before its commenced. So planning would be in stages, with multiple teams, and any clinical component would not necessarily have to be run by the methodology design team, the goal team, the analysis team etc. Such studies would indeed be cheap, but also very slow from my experience of teams. However that does not mean it cannot be done, and I have had this conversation (a version of it anyway) with someone recently, in private conversation.
However this team approach means that as one team signs off, and another takes over on a project, then the first team can move to a new project, and so on. Think of it like a factory assembly line.
Building databases for tracking patients is already being done, and we might consider consulting with those doing this already if we want to do something ourselves.
