Picture a fully developed CRF.  The form layout is pristine, the validation rules are working exactly the way you want them to, and the field data maps directly to your database tables.

What more can you ask for?

Unfortunately, forms hardly ever stay the same throughout the course of a clinical trial or a research study.  Forms frequently need to adapt to new data points that were unforeseen during the protocol definition phase.  So how can we handle this?

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How do you systematically make use of the varied Tablet PC screen resolution dimensions using C#?

Designing a CRF specifically for a Tablet PC can be a challenging experience, but it can also be one of the most rewarding.

The Tablet PC is very similar to a traditional desktop computer or a laptop.  As I write this entry, most Tablet PCs are running some variant of Windows.  Whether it’s Windows XP Tablet PC Edition or Vista (which has built-in support for Tablet PC specific functionality), you’re basically dealing with a Windows machine and you can pretty much treat it as such…  almost.

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While designing a CRF, little short-cuts can save you lots and lots of time.  This time-saver is straight-forward code-wise and should fit right into your C# code without much modification.

During CRF design time, I often have CRFs that have dozens and dozens of input controls (radio buttons, dropdowns, listboxes, textboxes…).  I’d like to add OnChange handlers to all of these input controls so that I know when a change has been made. Basically, what it comes down to is I want to know when the form is dirty, but I don’t want to add all the handlers by hand.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to and neither do you!

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Over 100 clinical research institutions adopted OpenClinica, an open-source EDC platform?

At first glance, OpenClinica looks likes a very polished product.  Based on the demo application, the web pages are snappy, and the user-interface seems pretty clean and friendly.  Of course it was a demo study, so it’s not clear how the application will fair under the heavy load of a phase III or phase IV clinical trial.  This definitely seems like something worth investigating, and here’s some more details.

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Whether you’re working on a big pharma clinical trial or a multi-site research study, changes will pop-up while the study is running. I have yet to find someone who enjoys changing electronic case report forms (CRFs), subject numbering schemes, or modifying user permissions in the middle of a study, but change requests will come and how you react to these changes defines the robustness of your design. It’s frustrating, and I’ve found that they are unfortunately a fact of life.

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