JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Providing user-friendly data collection tools for large multi-centric studies is key for obtaining high quality data ready to be used for data analysis projects. There are convenient software solutions that can be used to build data collection tools without in-depth programming knowledge, such as Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap). The situation is however more complicated with already on-going studies that lack a digital solution for data entry. So far, no standard tool is available to digitize on-going studies and provide electronic case report forms based on a pre-defined, potentially complicated study structure, and customized solutions are necessary. In this project, we describe how we performed a database migration from Oracle SQL to REDCap of the Swiss Mother and Child Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Cohort Study (MoCHiV), a longitudinal cohort study with around 2 million data entries dating back to the early 1980s. The main motivation for this project was to provide an electronic data entry platform for physicians and study nurses to collect study data – replacing the previous way of collecting information on paper forms and manually transferring it to an Oracle database. We outline the key steps for data migration, in particular the cleaning and re-formatting process, as well as our approach to validated the data by comparing Oracle SQL and REDCap data extractions. We come to the conclusion that on the one hand, REDCap offers a flexible way for designing a customized study design. On the other hand, the transfer of the already collected data to REDCap needs more advanced programming skills, with some potential workflows outlined in this project.