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I am trying to create a database that will store information on about 200 patients with a rare type of cancer over the course of many years. After I create the database, students will be inputting information from the clinical files into the database. I am struggling with how to best structure the database to be able to capture the timing of cancer recurrence, treatments before and after a recurrence, etc. For those of you that have used redcap, how do you best propose I go about this? I was planning on making a base list of variables and then adding "_1" to each of those variables to record information on recurrence, with each variable being attached to a date variable. Thoughts?

wibeasley
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Erin Dwyer
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1 Answers1

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Look into repeating instruments and repeating events. A recurrence of a cancer could be a repeating event, with its own instruments, such as cancer details, treatments (which may themselves be repeating instruments). Each instance of a repeating event will have an instance number (which is just an auto-incrementing database index so is not totally infallible, and will only reflect the order in which events were added), but you would also have a date field somewhere so you can reliably sort chronologically.

Implementing repeating events and instruments adds some complexity, but is well worth it if your data collection is genuinely repeated, as it sounds like.

Also, contact your local REDCap Administrator for more thorough help on this, especially when the complexities arise.

Jangari
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