Chunk #16 — Building and Supporting the REDCap Consortium: A Phased Approach — Phase 3: Creating a Small Consortium of Partners (4–10 sites; ~ 2006–2008) — Benefits:
The culture shift of thinking and acting like a consortium (as opposed to single groups acting on behalf of their own sites) began during this phase. A sense of community developed within the individuals participating in the weekly all-hands teleconferences. By collectively sharing and discussing use cases (e.g., local projects using or considering use of REDCap) on the weekly teleconferences, all Consortium REDCap administrators learned together how to optimally configure the platform to support diverse research studies. Although other electronic data capture systems existed (e.g., local homegrown systems, large commercial systems like Medidata Rave and Qualtrics), the fact that REDCap was easily configurable for diverse research study requirements and had a rapidly expanding group of distributed experts across research-centric academic medical centers increased the platform’s reputation and led to greater uptake and adoption by new Consortium partners. The up-front expectation for in-kind contribution from adopting sites allowed the Vanderbilt team to request and expect help from external experts. In turn, sites that actively contributed to REDCap development felt a positive sense of ownership towards the project. Remote collaboration with partners
