Growing use of the REDCap e-CRF solution for designing and managing databases among the scientific community

Last February, the Information Systems Department, committed to providing you with the tools you increasingly need for your clinical and epidemiological research, began offering a new service: the REDCap solution for electronic case report forms (eCRFs) (see previous BIP article).

REDCap is supported by a dedicated "REDCap-Pasteur" correspondant, and use of the new tool is growing among the Institut Pasteur's scientific community. This free application, developed by Vanderbilt University in 2004, is user friendly and easy to grasp, and it can be accessed anywhere via a web browser. It also offers the option of offline data capture via a mobile app, including in areas with no cellular coverage. REDCap complies with the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) 21 CFR Part 11 standards.

Some 172 users, 24 projects in production, 39 projects in development and 9 research teams are making use of this solution, which offers secure data stored at the Institut Pasteur.

Following its successful rollout of the application, the Institut Pasteur was represented at the annual REDCap conference, organized by Vanderbilt University for REDCap administrators, held during the summer in Chicago. Several representatives from the Information Systems Department's "Development of Information Systems for Science and Management" team and the Malaria: Parasites and Hosts Unit in the Parasites and Insect Vectors Department, also affiliated with the C3BI's bioinformatics and biostatistics HUB, attended this major event.

As well as reporting to the international consortium on the Institut Pasteur's growing use of REDCap, the conference offered an opportunity to present a use case related to a clinical trial on malaria in the Solomon Islands (the ACT-Radical trial). This use case is a good illustration of how to go about making an electronic collection of epidemiological data in an environment where internet access cannot be guaranteed. Use of the REDCap mobile application and its offline mode is a way of overcoming network coverage problems. The application also offers a multi-project approach to manage research phases carried out in parallel by different teams.

At this conference, the Development of Information Systems for Science and Management team also organized and led the first French-speaking workshop to be held among the international consortium. The various points discussed included REDCap's ability to manage translations, and cooperation was launched with the Spanish-speaking group to offer a standardized multilingual translation tool.

More information

See the visual aid presented at the conference:

• Contact: redcap@pasteur.fr