REDCap Forum ‘a big hit’

By Aidan Wilson

The 2022 Australia and New Zealand REDCap Forum has been labelled ‘a big hit’ with attendees and delegates. The forum was hosted by Helix, Monash University, and featured guest speaker, Vanderbilt University Medical Centre’s Rob Taylor, co-creator and lead developer of REDCap. The event took place in Melbourne on March 24 and 25, 2022.

The first day focused on REDCap users and featured presentations aimed to help users build their own REDCap projects, while the second day focused on helping REDCap Administrators from a variety of institutions in our region, and provided valuable opportunities for administrators to continue to build the local REDCap administrator and user community.

Intersect Australia contributed to the meeting with six presentations across the two days delivered by eResearch Analysts and REDCap Administrators Aidan Wilson (Australian Catholic University, pictured above) and Sam Ryan (La Trobe University). These presentations covered user-oriented material such as how to build Alerts and Notifications, and the importance of having a User Experience mindset when designing REDCap projects, as well as administrator-oriented material such as the variety of authentication methods available in REDCap, and the basics of administering the platform.

This forum was the second such meeting; the first being hosted by NSW Health’s Sydney Local Health District at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in 2019. The second instalment was scheduled for 2020, but was delayed until 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lead organiser and Monash University’s REDCap Administrator, John Liman, credits the involvement of the participants with the success of the forum. “The turnout was really impressive, and the large audience made a big difference to how we ran the meeting. We wanted it to be as open as possible, and we think the hybrid in-person/virtual format worked very well.”

The success of the forum is also being attributed to the presence of guest speaker Rob Taylor, who flew into Melbourne from Nashville, Tennessee, to attend in person and share his insights as lead developer of REDCap since nearly its inception, and his thoughts on collaboration with the Australian and New Zealand administrator community to jointly build and improve on this vital platform.

“The Australian and New Zealand administrators really are engaged with the ongoing development and improvement of REDCap, participating in monthly calls where we discuss new features and plan the future roadmap, so I was very much looking forward to coming here and meeting this engaged community.”