OpenClinica 3.0 Streamlines Clinical Trials

Recently, we've covered several examples of open source software tools aimed at humanitarian and global healthcare efforts. Even in niche categories, such as earthquake research, open source software is surprisingly widely used.

For a sense of how very many open source software tools there are for medical professionals--ranging from medical records keeping apps to medical image viewing software--check out this collection of 100 of them. Open source software is also having an impact on clinical trials, one of the most important ways that emerging drugs and treatments make it to patients who need them. Today, a free, open source version 3.0 of OpenClinica, the most popular open source Electronic Data Capture (EDC) application for use in clinical trials came out.

Among the improvements in the new version of OpenClinica are:

- A streamlined user interface that simplifies site usage
- A study progress dashboard
- Improved query workflows, with notifications, chain of custody, and task management
- Source data verification workspace
- Faster page load time
- Dedicated Study Build module
- Improved control over significant digits in eCRF data items
- Job scheduler
- Web services interface to allow for programmatic data interchange with other systems

"This release illustrates how an open source community can produce superior software," said Paul Galvin, OpenClinica Project Manager at Akaza Research. "Contributions and input from both industry and academic users and developers across the globe has allowed us to release the most feature rich, thoroughly tested, and high performance version of OpenClinica to date."

You can download the software here, and there are multiple demos of it available at the same link. You can also register for free here to attend webinars on how OpenClinica works, which will take place in late October. Webinar attendees will be able to ask questions online.