Why REDcap?

We recommend REDCap to develop a cost effective and flexible open-source registry that patients own and can easily modify to meet their evolving needs.


REDCap was designed to address data collection problems for biomedical researchers and was developed under a grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US. It was first released in 2004 and is free for hospitals and research organizations to license. 


REDCap is a rapid application development (RAD) platform. The key benefit of an agile RAD approach is fast project turnaround. In practice this means that changes requested by clinicians can be implemented within days instead of weeks or months. 


As this map shows, nearly every major research hospital in Europe is already a licensed user of REDCap.  Click tthe button below to see the current  REDCap licensees in any country: 
REDCap Sites

REDCap’s spreadsheet structure allows clinicians to modify and extend its design without requiring dedicated programming staff. A complex 60 page technical specification taking 6 months for stakeholders to specify and a further 6 months to develop is replaced by an evolving prototype. 


REDCap has been constantly upgraded since its launch and now supports all the feature required in advanced eCRF (electronic case report form) clinical trials software. This includes: 


  • Multi-arm studies 
  • Subject randomization 
  • Full audit trails
  • Role based security
  • Custom dashboards 
  • Automatic data validation 
  • Data quality checks
  • E-signatures 
  • Patient surveys
  • HIPAA and GDPR compliance



REDCap has an important number of less obvious advantages over using a proprietary software platform. Such as:


  1. Cloud hosting challenges are removed because hospitals are already hosting REDCap. 
  2. ERB approval is simplified as the hosting hospital will already have approved REDCap projects.
  3. As a not-for-profit platform, REDCap includes a free license for most clinical ontologies such as ORPHAcode, ICD-10, MedDRA, ATC. A commercial proprietary solution would have to pay significant license fees to use these ontologies. 
  4. There are no requirements for complex IP ownership and licensing agreements.
  5. There are no requirements for expensive annual Service Level Agreements (SLA) with defined minimum performance levels and escrow access to proprietary source code.
  6. The registry source code can be easily modified by any REDCap licensee. This encourages co-operation between researchers and pharma. It also allows national registries and pharma to add their own registry extensions to meet regulator and research requirements.

The net effect is that REDCap substantially reduces the cost, risk, and time to develop any registry or RWD project. 
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