Several hundreds of clinical trials are being conducted at any one time in the United States. Investigators of these trials invest vast amounts of resources and energy into conducting these studies and often face daily challenges with data management and data quality control. The management, transfer and storage of data generated from these studies create several pitfalls to conducting successful clinical trials including lack of real-time data reporting, lack of resources for recording the data, endless amounts of paper and lack of document storage space.

Rather than waiting months for study progress reports and interim and final analysis, investigators need quality data to be available for review and analysis in real time as well as the capabilities of relational database connections. The DCU is working towards meetings these needs and has developed a breakthrough operation model by introducing a web-based system, WebDCU™, to manage clinical trial data.

The following describes in more detail each aspect of the web-based clinical trial data management system: