Chunk #5 — Building and Supporting the REDCap Consortium: A Phased Approach — Phase 1: Developing REDCap at Vanderbilt University (1 site: ~ 2004–2005)
REDCap was developed in 2004 to provide Vanderbilt University clinical and translational researchers with a straightforward approach to create data management plans while implementing a secure, compliant data management system for their research studies. The institution recognized a need for a centralized data collection and management platform that could support diverse research domains without requiring study-specific programming support. A web-based solution provided researchers with an easy-to-access tool that was compliant with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) security requirements [49]. Research teams appreciated the fact that using the REDCap system created an opportunity to “own” the data management plan, speed development of study-specific data collection interfaces, and greatly reduce budget requirements for data management. During this phase, the software’s defining features included a metadata-driven process for developing data capture case report forms, a basic data export module, user rights functionality, and extensive data and operations logging necessary for HIPAA compliance. The REDCap system data architecture was originally flat, using a set of five replicable database tables for each project as previously described (for scalability, we
