Engineering OpenClinica’s Future

We recently introduced OpenClinica Participate™.

We believe all research participants—patients, clinicians, researchers, should have technology that meets the ‘anytime, anywhere’ expectations of a mobile, smartphone enabled world. Based on conversations with the OpenClinica community, many of you share this view as well. We are committed to making sure, at minimum, that OpenClinica’s patient engagement technology ‘just works’ in mobile, real world environments. Wherever possible, we will go beyond that and work to make the participant experience engaging, fun, and inspiring.

As transformational as these patient engagement capabilities can be, what we’ve been working on is about more than that. This is about a foundation for the future of the OpenClinica project.

As I briefly pointed out in an earlier post, OpenClinica Participate forms are powered by the new enketo-express app that was built around the widely used enketo-core form engine (both available on GitHub). OpenClinica will soon natively support the OpenRosa API, which will let you run Enketo, ODK Collect, or any of a number of OpenRosa-compliant data capture clients. Eventually, we envision the Enketo forms engine will replace the current CRF engine in the OpenClinica code base.

If you’re not familiar with Enketo, ODK, or OpenRosa, here’s a primer. Most important is understanding there is a rich global ecosystem of technology, developers and users around the OpenRosa Xform standard. The resultant solutions have been battle tested in diverse health care and field-based data collection settings over many years. In keeping with the open source principles of flexibility and choice, aligning the OpenClinica ecosystem with this community will provide new features and options that you can use.

As my 5 year-old son has taught me when we watch Spider-Man cartoons, with great power comes great responsibility. So it is with open source software. Tapping in to the richness and variety of the OpenRosa community creates new possibilities, but it can add complexity too by expanding the options you have to choose from. OpenClinica is released under an open source license so that many developers can improve, combine, and share their code in a way that enhances quality, usability, and features, and we believe that this richness will drive the next cycle of innovation.

With this goal of better encouraging code contributions, the focus of the repositories and downloads will be easy-to-use open-source libraries: building blocks for developers to create their own OpenClinica-powered apps and modules.

If you are developing on the OpenClinica code base to add features or build custom solutions, you’ll have a greater ability to mix and match just the pieces you need, and to share back your improvements in a modular fashion. It will be much easier for developers to use the libraries and share their experience and contributions back with the community. We will gladly help out if you experience issues. Our own engineers will be able to focus more of their time on improving quality, usability, and functionality, rather than on packaging, testing, and supporting so many different environments. We hope to build a strong collaboration with the Enketo and OpenRosa communities that spawns new ideas and developments.

So try it out! Check out OpenClinica Participate or get started by hooking up OpenClinica with Enketo.

And need I say, you’ll certainly be able to learn more about these OpenClinica innovations at the upcoming OC15 conference in Amsterdam, May 31-June 1.