Implementation of an open adoption research data management system for clinical studies

BACKGROUND: Research institutions need to manage multiple studies with individual data sets, processing rules and different permissions. So far, there is no standard technology that provides an easy to use environment to create databases and user interfaces for clinical trials or research studies. Therefore various software solutions are being used—from custom software, explicitly designed for a specific study, to cost intensive commercial Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS) up to very basic approaches with self-designed Microsoft(®) databases. FINDINGS: The technology applied to conduct those studies varies tremendously from study to study, making it difficult to evaluate data across various studies (meta-analysis) and keeping a defined level of quality in database design, data processing, displaying and exporting. Furthermore, the systems being used to collect study data are often operated redundantly to systems used in patient care. As a consequence the data collection in studies is inefficient and data quality may suffer from unsynchronized datasets, non-normalized database scenarios and manually executed data transfers. CONCLUSIONS: With OpenCampus Research we implemented an open adoption software (OAS) solution on an open source basis, which provides a standard environment for state-of-the-art research database management at low cost.