OpenClinica was recently featured in an article in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News titled “Commandeering Data with EDC Systems,” written by Dr. James Netterwald. The article briefly recounts the early days of clinical trial Electronic Data Capture (EDC). But how far have we come? Dr. Netterwald’s title (perhaps unintentionally) conjures up images of struggle and strife, which may be perhaps more a more apropos description of the journey of Electronic Data Capture than it may first appear.
As an industry, it’s taken us a good 20 years to get to where we are, and to be plain, it’s been a slow start. (In my own defense, I, and my company Akaza Research, have only been a party to the industry for the last 5 of those 20 years.) Climbing the evolutionary ladder from shipping laptops to sites to keying data into electronic case report forms is certainly progress by any measure. However, while the days of mailing tapes and disks are over, the days of real electronic data capture are yet to come. Today, most experts agree that somewhere between only one-half and two-thirds of all new clinical trials use EDC software, an of this only a very small fraction are “e-source,” defined as collecting data in electronic form at its source as opposed to keying it in from some other source. In some ways it is ironic that cutting-edge biopharmaceutical technologies are developed themselves with technologies that are, relatively speaking, much further down the technology food chain.
Notwithstanding, there are some enterprising few who have pushed the pace towards true EDC. Spaulding Clinical, a large phase 1 unit in West Bend, Wisconsin has developed a system that automatically captures ECG data from their facility’s patients and directly populates the clinical trial database with these data. A patient wears the ECG device and the data are transmitted wirelessly to the EDC system. However, this slick and highly productive solution was not developed by either the ECG vendor or the EDC vendor. It was developed by hand by one of Spaulding’s own software developers.
Why isn’t this type of solution more commonplace in clinical trials? What prevents the industry from making the most of today’s information technology? With the strong incentives currently in place to make research more efficient, our field could certainly benefit from some more forward thinking.
– Ben Baumann