Multi-server set-up of REDCap for GRAPHIC 2 study

For the GRAPHIC 2 study, some patients will be recruited from home using laptops.

The two laptops are UHL machines with Ubuntu VMs using VMWare Player. To maintain the integrity of data, REDCap exports should be performed regularly on the laptops, and REDCap imports on the master system to ensure full data is held on the master system. Since the GRAPHIC patient identifiers are being manually entered, there should be no issue with data duplication or over-writing.

Laptops must have open-vm-tools installed in order to be able to do a 'soft' suspend.

REDCap import process includes a full validation step, which must be checked visually to ensure expected performance each time.

The export process must either be selective (manually identifying which records to export) or else it risks being destructive when later exports are imported over the top of amended data on the master system. Given these risks, the best solution may well be for the export-import process to be followed by a step to erase all data on the laptop, meaning that all amendments to data (subsequent data entry such as the exercise diary and ABP monitoring data) must take place on the master system.

A training guide has been provided for the nurses on GRAPHIC 2 for creating, exporting, importing and then erasing data.

All versions of REDCap must be maintained at the same release version.

Calculated fields cannot be imported. Either exclude the data at export time, or remove those fields from the laptop versions of the questionnaire - provided there is no impact on the branching logic in the rest of the questionnaire. Affected questions are total_beer, total_wine, total_spirits, total_alc_pw, bmi, result_waist_hip_ratio. Also smoking!

Deleted 9 rows in total from the questionnaire csv and saved as a 'laptop version'. Installed on both laptops.