REDRightHand is coming

November 5, 2024 by Josh Senyak

REDCap is a great choice for collecting clinical research data. REDCap makes it easy to create a simple, secure, HIPAA-compatible web-based data collection system for research. There are many great advanced features, including surveys, longitudinal data collection, code snippets and more (although the learning curve for these features is a lot steeper than the base functionality). REDCap claims it’s been used for 3.4 million projects worldwide, and though the lion’s share of that number must be test or training projects, it’s still an impressive presence.

But REDCap presents a number of headaches, most notably the challenge of exporting the data into a form that can be analyzed. If you’re just using the most primitive kind of REDCap project, there’s no real issue: the export files give you one row per participant and (more or less) one column per data element. But if you use REDCap features like “longitudinal collection” or “repeating instruments or events” – features that give you some of the functionality of a truly relational database – the REDCap exports become more cryptic and harder to parse.

REDRightHand was created to help with this issue. REDRightHand is a utility that grabs the data from your REDCap project and organizes it into nice neat normalized tables in an Access database. If you’re used to working with relational databases like Access, mySQL, postrgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server, you might find REDRightHand the answer to your prayers.

How REDRightHand works:

• REDRightHand grabs metadata and data from your REDCap project using the REDCap API. This means that some user of the REDCap project (who has sufficient permissions to export all data) must request a REDCap API key. Normally this is a simple matter that can be approved by your REDCap administrators overnight.
• REDRightHand is built within a Microsoft Access database file. This means that you will need to run REDRightHand on a computer (Windows only) that has MS Access installed. Since the utility will be downloading all the data in your REDCap project, you want to be sure to install REDRightHand on a secure server if the data includes protected or confidential information!

You may have seen REDWrap, a previous utility from Quicksilver which likewise converts REDCap exports into normalized tables. But REDRightHand is a much more powerful tool than REDWrap:

• REDRightHand uses the REDCap API, so you don’t need to manually download dictionary or export files.
• REDRightHand can handle data dictionaryies of any size (REDWrap was limited to projects with 255 fields or less)
• REDRightHand is generally more powerful and robust than REDWrap.

Currently (November 2024), REDRightHand is still in beta testing. We are asking colleagues to try out the utility and suggest improvements. We hope to provide the research community with access to REDRightHand in the very near future.