eClinical Integration

Increasingly I am seeing real momentum for reducing the costs and barriers to integration of eclinical applications and data in a way that benefits users. A great example is a recent LinkedIn discussion (you may need to join the group to read it).  Several software vendors and industry experts engaged in a dialogue about the pros and cons of different integration approaches. There is an emerging consensus that integration approaches should adopt open, web standards and harnesses the elegance and flexibility of the CDISC Operational Data Model. This consensus may signal a sea change in attitudes to standards-based integration that makes it the norm rather than the exception.

This is not new to members of the OpenClinica community. Over the years we’ve had many examples of such integration efforts described on this blog and at OpenClinica conferences. To make such efforts more powerful, reusable, and robust, the OpenClinica team has invested a great deal over the past year to create a meaningful, CDISC ODM-based model for interacting with OpenClinica. We have incorporated open web standards (RESTful APIs for transport and OAuth for security) to make the interfaces easily accessible with commonly used software tools.  This is part of a newly published resource for OpenClinica development and integration, the OpenClinica 3.1 Technical Documentation Guide. The first version of the specification can be viewed at https://docs.openclinica.com/3.1/technical-documents/rest-api-specifications. I’ve reproduced the introduction here:...