Background

Open Data Capture is developed by the Douglas Neuroinformatics Platform, a small team of technical personnel at the Douglas Research Centre in Montreal, Canada. Our work is funded by a grant associated with the McGill Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL) initiative. This grant provides us with, among other things, a mandate to improve digital mental health services at the Douglas. Central to this mandate is providing a standardized, secure, and easy-to-use solution for clinical research data capture and storage.

Our objective was to modernize clinical research data management at the Douglas. Previous practices varied widely between clinics, typically consisting of either spreadsheets with inconsistent and undocumented naming conventions, or loose collections of printed documents or handwritten notes. Often, these data were not versioned and exchanged through email, physical transfer, or fax. Open Data Capture provided an integrated solution that successfully superseded these disparate, obsolete practices.