The REDCap consortium: Building an international community of software platform partners

Abstract

The Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) data management platform was developed in 2004 to address an institutional need at Vanderbilt University, then shared with a limited number of adopting sites beginning in 2006. Given bi-directional benefit in early sharing experiments, we created a broader consortium sharing and support model for any academic, non-profit, or government partner wishing to adopt the software. Our sharing framework and consortium-based support model have evolved over time along with the size of the consortium (currently more than 3200 REDCap partners across 128 countries). While the "REDCap Consortium" model represents only one example of how to build and disseminate a software platform, lessons learned from our approach may assist other research institutions seeking to build and disseminate innovative technologies.

Keywords: Clinical research; Electronic data capture; Medical informatics; Translational research.

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figures

Figure 1:

Map of Consortium (December 19, 2018) – 3,207 partner institutions in 128 countries

Figure 2:

Growth of REDCap Consortium per Year.

Figure 3:

Web of Science Treemap Visualization showing the number of papers citing REDCap by Research Area. This graphic was generated on 12/19/2018 and represents the top 15 of 105 relevant research areas by frequency of occurrence mapped to 6233 total papers citing REDCap between 2009 and 2018. This bibliometric report shows the diversity of scientific impact for the REDCap platform.

Figure 4:

System activity and metrics reporting screen from Vanderbilt’s primary REDCap installation. Notably, research project numbers show the platform’s utility for basic research use cases and also the full spectrum of clinical and translational research. Operational and Quality Improvement project numbers also highlight the diversity of use at Vanderbilt.