TASKA: A modular task management system to support health research studies

BACKGROUND: Many healthcare databases have been routinely collected over the past decades, to support clinical practice and administrative services. However, their secondary use for research is often hindered by restricted governance rules. Furthermore, health research studies typically involve many participants with complementary roles and responsibilities which require proper process management. RESULTS: From a wide set of requirements collected from European clinical studies, we developed TASKA, a task/workflow management system that helps to cope with the socio-technical issues arising when dealing with multidisciplinary and multi-setting clinical studies. The system is based on a two-layered architecture: 1) the backend engine, which follows a micro-kernel pattern, for extensibility, and RESTful web services, for decoupling from the web clients; 2) and the client, entirely developed in ReactJS, allowing the construction and management of studies through a graphical interface. TASKA is a GNU GPL open source project, accessible at https://github.com/bioinformatics-ua/taska. A demo version is also available at https://bioinformatics.ua.pt/taska. CONCLUSIONS: The system is currently used to support feasibility studies across several institutions and countries, in the context of the European Medical Information Framework (EMIF) project. The tool was shown to simplify the set-up of health studies, the management of participants and their roles, as well as the overall governance process.