Chunk #29 — Building and Supporting the REDCap Consortium: A Phased Approach — Phase 5: Building a Diverse Community (~ 500 sites; ~ 2009–2012) — Challenges:
Growing numbers of stakeholders and users limited our ability to be as responsive to individual project needs. We attempted to mitigate this by creating small topic-specific consortium working groups. More partners led to even greater demand for just-in-time information requests from REDCap administrators supporting local installations and user training. To maintain our no-cost distribution and support model, we asked consortium partners to be even more proactive sharing local communication strategies and training materials with one another. The increasing visibility of REDCap led our Vanderbilt Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization to question our ‘no cost’ consortium model, ultimately resulting in hiring of a consulting firm to assess various models of commercialization. Internal discussions and business use case evaluations required considerable time commitment from the Vanderbilt team, but we ultimately settled on agreement with the technology transfer office that we would continue to support and grow the consortium with no-cost software distribution and limited support for academic, non-profit, and government institutions while formulating a commercial-based hosting service for industry sponsored trials.
