New Capabilities Added to OpenClinica Version 3.1

For the past 12 months, the OpenClinica development team has been working diligently on the next major OpenClinica release. In a prior blog post (OpenClinica 3.1 (project “Amethyst”) Preview), I discussed some of the new functionality and key improvements this forthcoming release will include. Since then, the development team has added some more pieces of functionality, most notably:

• Re-factoring of Extract Data to enable custom data transformations
• Discrepancy Note “Days Open” filter
• Discrepancy Note “Days Since Updated” filter
• CRF Header updates
• Additional study parameter configuration options
• Interviewer Name – not used
• Interview Data – not used
• Location – not used
• OpenClinica Data Mart for ad hoc reporting*
• GUI-based Rules designer*
• Custom Data Transformations

From a development perspective, perhaps the most significant piece of functionality in the above list is the complete re-factoring of the Extract Data module. In prior versions of OpenClinica, the Extract Data module would natively export CDISC ODM 1.2, CDISC ODM 1.3, both ODM 1.2 and 1.3 with OpenClinica extensions, tab-delimited text, and an SPSS file format. While these formats will continue to be available in 3.1, OpenClinica will have the ability to process (via XSL style sheets) any CDISC ODM 1.3 data set into any other data format.