MedRed: A healthcare data acquisition service for research purposes

Research in the healthcare domain requires the collection of important and exhaustive datasets in order to validate a scientific hypothesis, or to assess the effectiveness of a treatment, technology, medicine, or procedure. The data acquisition phase for this type of work requires an often under-estimated amount of time and effort, while needing to maintain high quality standards for the entire process. Many of the tasks associated with data acquisition are often carried out manually, resulting in error-prone procedures, hand-transcription, inaccuracy, and time delays to produce a usable dataset. This paper presents MedRed (medical research data acquisition platform), an interface  and a service designed to facilitate the data acquisition process for researchers in the healthcare domain, and using REDCap software for data capture. This service is available first of all to all scientists at the HES-SO (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland) schools in Switzerland, and is partially supported by the Swiss universities’ CUS-P2 programme.