Redesign of an in House Electronic Data Capture System to Streamline Hematopoietic Stem Cell Informatics Needs: Safeguarding over 40 Years of Data

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The CRDB (Clinical Research Database) at MSKCC (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) has over 40 years of transplant data in its repository. From the inception of the database in the early 1990s, the CRDB has captured data for patients on IRB approved studies as well as for patients that have passed through the bone marrow transplant (BMT) services. Historically, the CRDB has utilized mostly institution wide, generic forms for capturing data. This included topic-based forms for disease, pathology, infusion, treatment, GVHD, etc. This created difficulty with training new staff, maintaining accurate and timely data entry, and querying data out in an easily useable format. It also made mapping the data to FormsNet through AGNIS problematic, requiring duplicate data entry. With the BMT program growing at an exponential pace, we needed a solution to streamline data entry to enable a successful AGNIS implementation as well as reduce the time and complexity of data entry. Such solution would also reduce data entry errors and quality assurance time. We embarked on a 2 year-long journey of reviewing options for in-house solutions versus vendor-based solutions and ultimately reorganizing the CRDB BMT interface utilizing our existing data structure to maintain the historical data. We developed a ‘study calendar' specific to the BMT along with our ‘Dynamic forms' (data points once in static forms) now mapped by activity and segment in the calendar, similar to the timepoints in FormsNet. We went from about 24 standalone forms to about 40 timepoint based Dynamic forms specific to the BMT schedules. Data was broken down in the dynamic forms by the type of data collected at specific timepoints. This enables research staff to clearly locate where to enter data and how it should be entered. Since the roll out in January of this year, we have noticed an improvement in training new staff members and a reduction in data entry errors.