Summary
Background: Clinical trials (CT) are in a wider sense experiments to prove and establish clinical
benefit of treatments. Nowadays electronic data capture systems (EDCS) are used more
often bringing a better data management and higher data quality into clinical practice.
Also electronic systems for the randomization are used to assign the patients to the
treatments.
Objectives: If the mentioned randomization system (RS) and EDCS are used, possibly identical
data are collected in both, especially by stratified randomization. This separated
data storage may lead to data inconsistency and in general data samples have to be
aligned. The article discusses solutions to combine RS and EDCS. In detail one approach
is realized and introduced.
Methods: Different possible settings of combination of EDCS and RS are determined and the
pros and cons for each solution are worked out. For the combination of two independent
applications the necessary interfaces for the communication are defined. Thereby,
existing standards are considered. An example realization is implemented with the
help of open-source applications and state-of-the-art software development procedures.
Results: Three possibilities of separate usage or combination of EDCS and RS are pre -sented
and assessed: i) the complete independent usage of both systems; ii) realization of
one system with both functions; and iii) two separate systems, which communicate via
defined interfaces. In addition a realization of our preferred approach, the combination
of both systems, is introduced using the open source tools RANDI2 and Open-Clinica.
Conclusion: The advantage of a flexible independent development of EDCS and RS is shown based
on the fact that these tool are very different featured. In our opinion the combination
of both systems via defined interfaces fulfills the requirements of randomization
and electronic data capture and is feasible in practice. In addition, the use of such
a setting can reduce the training costs and the error-prone duplicated data entry.
Keywords
Random allocation - software design - electronic data capture - randomized controlled
trial - open source
