Dear fellow-researchers,
Warm greetings and a hearty welcome to the REDCap community of AIIMS Delhi!
When a new software is developed, it is traditional to type the first output as – “Hello World!” This brief blogpost forms the epitomal ‘hello world’ shout of the of the AIIMS REDCap community and is our first step in establishing a network of REDCap users in the institute. So, if you have come to this page, read on…
Data management and user management forms the administrative backbone of all research. However, as we are all acutely aware, managing data and users can quickly become a time-consuming and difficult task, as the number and complexity of our research projects increase.
We all feel, in varying degrees, that digital solutions might be of help in decreasing or automating our workload. However, understanding the nuances of information technology is often difficult and we feel completely lost, when faced with software developers asking us about apache and json files. Finally, our research data is too precious to us, and we dread phrases like “virus attack” or “system offline!”. Therefore, although we have a need for embracing the digital, our stringent requirements limit our choices.
At minimum, we feel, a research software should be easy to use by researchers, with minimal training, and with minimal dependence on tech-support. We also need a system with high flexibility and with robust security. Protection and privacy of patient digital data have come to the forefront of legal debate over the last decade, and therefore any EDC (Electronic Data Capture) system needs to comply with established health regulatory standards. Any software we entrust our precious data, needs to be reputable and well established in the academic community. And finally, we needed a software solution that would be completely free, for now and ever!
Our search led us through a journey of various innovative software platforms. From Open Data Kit, Epi-Info, Epi-Data, OpenClinica, Qualtrics to even Google Forms and SurveyMonkey; we tried them all. While some were too complex for clinicians (ODK), others were too limiting (Google forms, and survey monkey), some were offline only (epi-info and Microsoft Access), and still others, while user friendly, were costly (Qualtrics).
Finally, we found that our requirements aligned best with REDCap, a software originally created by a small group of researchers of the Vanderbilt university under a NIH grant. What attracted us to REDCap was the philosophy of their team – “REDCap’s developers firmly believed that nobody could know the research as well as the researcher. So a user-friendly web-based interface was introduced to put the researchers in total control of their work. No background knowledge or technical experience was needed to use REDCap; researchers could directly manage their own projects whenever and however they wished, through any browser on any device.”
REDCap also ticked many of the right boxes for research. REDCap enjoys an excellent repute amongst scientific community and has partnerships with most of the top universities around the world (4737 institutes across 140 countries). The software is open source (not proprietary to one company) and Vanderbilt provides the server-based software free of charge to all partner institutes. It meets all US and international medical and patient data protection requirement through its inbuilt security protocols. And finally, it can only be deployed through institute servers which helped us comply with Indian government guidelines of keeping patient data on in-country servers.
REDCap Partners – World Map
As our comfort and confidence in the software grew, we started encouraging other faculty members, residents, and PhD scholars to use the platform. We started taking hand-holding sessions for interested Junior Residents and Senior Residents, and even for Departments, in small groups. There were teething problems, including server downtime, login errors, or getting stuck with software glitches, which we could not immediately solve, and we thank the initial researchers who bore with us, while we hunted the REDCap community forum for help. We used REDCap and found that it was easy to learn. It was robust and in the last 4 years of use, it has never resulted in a single data loss, something we all were very worried about.
As interest in the REDCap platform increased, and as we worked out the kinks in the system, we started loving it for its simplicity and for granular control over data and user rights. Finally, we decided to go pan-institute with REDCap, creating a system, that can be easily accessed from intranet as well as from internet from any device, at any time. We also created this website to automate user creation, project request verification, information dissemination etc. Finally, we wanted to develop a redcap community of our own at AIIMS so that, we can share our expertise and help one another. AIIMS-REDCap is maintained in-house, & its use for research is completely free. We wish to help students, residents, scholars, researchers, and faculty members use this online platform for research, in a manner that best suits their need. We are fast growing as a community, and I welcome you all to this site. So, what are you waiting for … jump right in! Create your account, contribute small articles, and support your colleagues and juniors in their digital research endeavor.
Happy REDCapping!
