REDCap

Owned by Trevor Bain
Aug 30, 2024
2 min read

REDCap stands for Research Electronic Data Capture. “REDCap is a secure web platform for building and managing online databases and surveys.” It was developed and is maintained by Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. A brief overview of REDCap video is available on their site.

The Faculty of Health REDCap server is available for researchers (including students if supported by their supervisor). To request an account on the REDCap server, please email Health Computing. Students need to provide the contact information for the faculty member in the Faculty of Health who is sponsoring/approving their access.

Once approved, log in to the server at https://healthredcap.uwaterloo.ca/ using the University of Waterloo account option on the main page (userid@uwaterloo.ca). Upon request, accounts can be created for external people but a faculty member in the Faculty of Health needs to sponsor their access and projects.

A few notes that we send to everyone using this service:

  1. Health Computing are providing the platform but we are not REDCap experts so we cannot provide support on how to use REDCap (beyond looking for answers in the REDCap forums).
    There are “Training Videos” and “Help and FAQ” sections within REDCap itself that you can use for reference. In addition to the Training Videos within REDCap, there is a YouTube playlist of REDCap videos from Athabasca University that are quite good (although their login and setup are slightly different than here): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvluM-aGio_YagxT3HdZLp3xZZ0GPkavf

  2. There is a maintenance window to apply updates to REDCap every Wednesday morning. These may require server restarts so we advise against using the service during that time. There are reminders at the top of the Log In, Home and My Projects pages.

  3. If there are others at UW who need access to your project, you can provide us their userids (or email addresses works and we can look up their userids). If you have external people we would need more details, specifically: First name, Last name, email address

  4. You can request a new project by providing details in the form that appears after clicking the “+New Project” button at the top. The request will come to Health Computing to approve - we need to make note of the Principal Investigator (PI) is for each project so we know who to contact.