Extending REDCap through External Modules

Mr Aidan Wilson¹

¹Intersect Australia, Sydney, Australia

Background

REDCap is a secure electronic data collection and management application that is used in more than 5000 universities, hospitals, government departments and non-profit organisations in Australia, New Zealand, and internationally. It is quickly becoming a de facto standard for the safe collection of clinical and sensitive data, and allows users to quickly build online forms for data entry, compile forms into events, and distribute them as surveys.

Actions

The REDCap developers at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre have always encouraged the community to extend the application, and provide the frameworks to allow developers to do so. Over the years, the framework has become more mature, and since 2018, developers have been able to publish their extensions in a repository of External Modules.

Results

External Modules bring additional functionality to, or fill existing gaps in, the core REDCap software. Examples range from modules that allow project designers to tweak aspects of the survey respondent user interface, to allowing designers to inject custom javascript or css into any page, to augmenting the default CSV export options to include an Extract, Transform, Load capability.

Conclusion

This presentation will provide an insight into the external module framework, and describe how modules are constructed, published, approved and maintained, using the author’s own recently published External Module as a case study. This insight will benefit technical REDCap administrators, technical users, and developers of applications that could programmatically interface with REDCap, who may be interested in extending REDCap but do not know where to begin.

Biography:

Aidan Wilson is Intersect’s eResearch Analyst at Australian Catholic University, where his role includes administering the REDCap system, delivering user training, and supporting ACU’s users with consultation and advice. He is also a REDCap developer, having recently published an External Module, and is active in the consortium community, assisting other administrators with tips, tricks, and troubleshooting.