A Birds of a Feather (BoF) and an oral presentation, both on REDCap, have won their respective delegate favourite prizes at the recent eResearch Australasia conference. The BoF session – jointly organised by Aidan Wilson, Intersect’s eResearch Analyst at ACU, and Dr Christopher McAvaney, eResearch Services Manager at Deakin University – brought together REDCap administrators from a wide range of universities and research institutes around Australia, to discuss issues around supporting this application in the Australian and New Zealand context.
REDCap is a data collection platform designed and developed by Vanderbilt University for secure clinical and health data collection and management, but it can also be used to build anything from simple surveys to multi-site, longitudinal, randomised controlled trials. It has seen a rapid growth in the Australasian region in recent years, with around 200 Australian and around 90 New Zealand organisations represented among the REDCap consortium, which boasts nearly 5000 members worldwide, and while the community of local administrators is now large, the platform has rarely been discussed at fora such as eResearch Australasia.
“We wanted to bring together administrators so that newer admins could learn from the experiences of those that have been in the REDCap game for years” said Aidan Wilson, co-organiser of the session. “We also saw a need to build a community of practice among the Australian and New Zealand organisations using REDCap.”
Besides Mr Wilson and Dr McAvaney, the session’s organisers include John Liman from Monash University, Dr David Jung from UNSW Sydney, Yelena Fridgant from Sydney Local Health District, and Dr Weisi Chen and Shaun Grady, Intersect eResearch Analysts for UTS and the University of Newcastle respectively.
The session, titled REDCap: data capture from humans with a valuable and sustainable platform. Challenges and opportunities for REDCap administrators, began with some use cases that demonstrate the range of utility that REDCap brings to institutions, before progressing to topics of interest to current and prospective administrators, such as how to use Australian Access Federation’s RapidConnect to minimise user administration, integrating with other institutional systems, and providing end users with support and training.
In a double-win for REDCap, organiser John Liman also won the delegate favourite oral presentation for his session with colleague Chris Mac Manus Supporting REDCap at scale at Monash University, which focused on how to efficiently support REDCap and its several thousand users.
Both prizes underscore the emerging importance of REDCap in the local research landscape, and organisers promise that REDCap’s presence at eResearch Australasia and other similar meetings is set to grow in future years.
“We think next year we’ll see several oral presentations on REDCap,” said Dr McAvaney, “and maybe another BoF.”