Why REDCap is capturing the interest of UB researchers

Let’s say you are a researcher in need of a data collection tool. It needs to be secure. It needs to be adaptable. It should make exporting data easy. And is automatic calculation of data too much to ask?

REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) handles all of these needs, and many University at Buffalo researchers have found it to be an essential tool for setting up projects and analyzing results. The secure web application for building and securely managing online surveys and databases has been a popular option for researchers since its university-wide expansion in 2019, and before then with Jacobs School support from its Office of Medical Computing.

“REDCap offers an online, centralized data collection experience,” says UB Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) IT Business Analyst Joseph Ventresca. “That means no more passing around an Excel spreadsheet and hoping your teammates have the latest version. You can pipe data to other instruments or surveys to limit data entry and the spelling errors that go along with it. Essentially, you enter the information once and you can use it in multiple places.”

CTSI Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Research Design (BERD) Core Director Gregory Wilding, PhD, Chair and Professor, Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health and Health Professions, has often worked with UB researchers on how to best set up their projects using tools such as REDCap.

“Using a validated electronic data capture system for the building and management of study databases is critical as it helps ensure the generation of high-quality, statistically sound data,” Wilding says. “As our ability to generalize study results to populations of interest is dependent on the proper implementation of established data management principles, use of tools such as REDCap need to be a standard component of UB research endeavors.”

The researcher view

Grace Dean, PhD, RN, Professor, School of Nursing, is a frequent user of REDCap and a major proponent. She and her team are currently using the tool for a study titled “Efficacy of Nurse-Delivered Brief Behavioral Treatment to Self-Manage Insomnia in Cancer Survivors.”

Dean and her research team have used REDCap to set up research projects and build surveys and data collection instruments. REDCap solved numerous problems. Many researchers, she says, still use paper for data collection, a process she believes is risky and overly time-consuming.

“If you think of working with paper — you are piling it up, it is getting dusty waiting to go out in the mail, then it comes back or sometimes it gets lost in the mail,” Dean explains. “Then, you spend hours putting it into the computer; you have to stop what you are doing and completely focus. However, with REDCap, things are automatic. There is no data cleaning; we have already done that, and we have pre-tested everything. It is just phenomenal, and you are even able to see it populating.”

Dean says the time-saving aspects and the ability to better organize is tremendous, so much so that she has often recommended REDCap to colleagues. In one case, she says it cut a research team’s prep time in half. Similarly, nurse interventionist Misol Kwon, a member of Dean’s team, says using REDCap has saved her “months of work.”

Another member of Dean’s team, study coordinator Donna Tyrpak, says that “REDCap allows for organized data collection of things like demographics and instruments, and performs sophisticated calculations of data that would otherwise have to be performed by hand.”

In addition, she uses REDCap for email communication with individual participants and to schedule future emails for data collection. She adds that the “REDCap dashboard allows for easy snapshot of various time points.”

Gregory G. Homish, PhD, Chair and Professor, Department of Community Health and Health Behavior, School of Public Health and Health Professions, uses REDCap for assessments in a research study titled Health Evaluation of the Results of Opioid Intervention Court (HEROIC). He says REDCap allowing participants to complete the study survey on their own device — phone, tablet, laptop — helps the research team to better analyze results.

“It allows easy export of data to common statistic packages, and it is easy to create customized reports in a variety of formats,” Homish says. “REDCap is a very complete product with a lot of flexibility. It is also a very cost-effective tool compared to other products available.”

Lori Hatzinger is a recent exercise science graduate from UB and is currently working as a research assistant in UB’s Nutrition and Health Research Lab. After hearing about REDCap from a lab colleague, she spent time learning the basic steps. She found it to be an effective tool for collecting data.

“REDCap created a nice flow to our projects,” she says. “We do behavioral research, and flow and organization is very important. It has also been a blessing during the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down our in-person visits. Having this online system allowed projects to run smoothly and was easy to administer when virtual.”

Hatzinger says one advantage of using REDCap is the ability to see and analyze survey answers quickly.

“REDCap can do a lot,” she says. “If you try it out, [my advice is to] be curious and search for how your ideas can be done. It can be a great tool and there is a large REDCap community.”

REDCap tricks and tips

• Import existing studies from Excel spreadsheets into REDCap and continue the data collection in REDCap.
• Figure out what data you need to report on and build the REDCap instruments/project to collect that data in a way that it gives it back to you exactly how you need it.
• There is lots of help built right into REDCap to assist the end user. Clicking on any of the links all around the screen will take you to built-in help pages that let you know exactly how things work.
• For an overview of REDCap features and video tutorials, visit the Training Resources page.
• Learn more from this 2019 article written when REDCap was launched at UB.
• Have further REDCap questions? Write to REDCapHelp@buffalo.edu.