Open source or commercial products for electronic data capture in clinical trials? a scorecard comparison

Collection and organization of data in clinical trials requires a sophisticated information management system. An ideal system should be easily accessible over web-technology and should provide high security of data. When deciding for a solution meanwhile even mid- and big-sized companies also evaluate open-source platforms against pure commercial solutions as the use of open-source products seems to get more and more feasible: early open-source disadvantages like limited support and limited user-friendliness seem to disappear. With this work the authors intended to discuss a basic scheme for which software and strategy to choose: objective was to develop a scorecard for decision support with parameters of the trial, user-needs, scale/dimension of the trial, financial budget, IT-resources and long term objectives of the companies IT-strategy. The scorecard can be obtained free from the authors.