OpenClinica

OpenClinica for Investigator led Clinical Trials in the UK

Zalety:

Easy to create and update forms for data collection

Wady:

Automatic scheduling is a bit limited, however this is planned to be updated soon

Why I cannot live without OpenClinica

Komentarze: I have worked with OpenClinica for more than 15 years and loved how it has developed

Zalety:

The ease of set up a new study and the management functions

Wady:

I cannot think of anything, have worked with clinical studies my entire professional life and used any tool on the market and OpenClinica has resolved all the issues.

An honest review

Komentarze: I loved building the study. The options for designing forms are diverse, though some of them require learning additional skillsets to be able to implement, which they don't explain to you in the training. The design tool is lacking but once you get the hang of designing with the spreadsheets there are a lot of possibilities. Many queries cannot be sustained easily by their build in data validation system and you will need to use an external querying system to appropriately manage all the data. This would have been good to know from the beginning. They charge you for training hours but require you to use them within a certain timeframe or they expire. It's a use it or lose it thing. I don't remember that being a thing until the last year and I really don't like it at all. If I pay for the training hours that I'm forced to by in certain hour blocks of time then I should get to use them whenever I need them, not in a window of time that OC thinks is reasonable. They are paid for. The customer service people are always friendly and helpful. Some training sessions go really well, especially when you are with someone hire up on the support team, but there have been many sessions where the trainer is referring to a manual to instruct me on my question and I lose a lot of my "training hours" waiting for them to figure it out and then pass on the information. I'd prefer to just have the manual and figure it out myself.

Zalety:

I love the diversity in the form design. There are a lot of great features and possibilities that can make a very sophisticated form/study.

Wady:

The built in edit checks/constraints are very limited in what they can do. The stuff they have is great, but the ability to do cross-form logic checks gets very messy, very fast and for some of the most simple data. You have to use a separate system to access the database for reports and full audit details called Insight and you have to pay extra to use that with your study. It's the only way to find and send reports to sites/safety teams that do not have access to Insight. The automated survey invitation tool is a mess. The system easily breaks and invitations do not get sent out as expected and the means to test this for accuracy is very difficult so you feel like you are setting up a tool blindly that is most expected to fail. The sites get very frustrated and do not trust the software to help them keep their visits on track and completed as expected. We have also run into problems where participants can access surveys too early. There has been a lot of clean up work we've had to do and a lot of hours spent trying to find all the errors since the querying system is limited in it's design to pretty basic edit checks. Cross form date checks are not at all easy and very much needed to quickly catch the system errors that happen. The randomization tool is pretty sophisticated but it also costs extra and whenever you need to do updates to the tool it's a much more difficult process then simply publishing it to test. This also adds layers of difficulty to the testing.

Moving in the right direction

Komentarze: Overall switching to OpenClinica has brought numerous benefits to our data collection methods. The learning curve for some employees has been steep, however, a few months in I can claim that it was worth the effort. I look forward to whatever new features/updates OpenClinica team has planned in the future.

Zalety:

OpenClinica offers a wide array of features for electronic data collection. Specifically the customizability of the forms and events when designing a survey has benefitted us immensely. Additionally, the OpenClinica team members work hard to both understand what their users need and proactively update the software with new features.

Wady:

Sometimes there are minor delays on some customer support requests.

OpenClinica 4

Komentarze: Overall the experience with OpenClinica has been very positive so far. Apart from being an all encompassing system, it has a good support infrastructure and works pretty well even with the time zone differences (i.e., US/UK) and usually resolutions are provided in good time.
User feedback is always well received and feature changes are genuinely considered to be included in the roadmaps. We have dealt with some pretty complex projects over the last couple of years and have had a positive experience.

Zalety:

OpenClinica is a pretty comprehensive platform that can tailor to most if not all needs of data capture. The interface is easy to use and navigate and the drag and drop design features allow even the less technical to be able to create data capture forms with relative ease. There is a lot of material to help users understand the system and the support is good.

Wady:

The customisation of user roles and permission is somewhat restricted meaning there is less flexibility when dealing with multiple different access levels. Some of the additional modules and if professional services have to be engaged to deal with user errors and compliance issues can come up a little on the expensive side especially in a an academic setting.