Background

Overview

Electronic data capture (EDC) systems have increasingly replaced paper-based methods of collecting research data. As EDC systems have proliferated, however, so has the number of incompatible formats for storing EDC instruments (form configurations). The lack of interoperability among EDC formats makes it difficult to reuse, share, or find previously configured instruments unless they were configured for the same EDC system. Ideally, each research instrument would need to be configured only once, would be stored in an easily accessible place for others to use, and would work seamlessly with its users’ EDC tools.

The Research Instrument Open Standard (RIOS) brings this ideal closer to reality by laying the groundwork for an interoperable ecosystem of research instruments. All EDC instruments have at least four types of properties: content (e.g., text of questions and response options), structure (e.g., ordering, grouping of questions), internal logic (e.g., skip logic, validation rules), and method of display (e.g., pagination, form controls used to collect responses). RIOS is an open metadata standard for representing research instruments. It offers a generic, well-defined schema for representing the content, structure, logic, and display properties shared by all EDC instruments, without relying on the idiosyncratic representations of EDC systems.

By moving to a standard research instrument definition, researchers can begin to develop converters to move instrument configurations between EDC systems. Prototype converters for moving to and from the RIOS standard and Qualtrics and REDCap EDC formats are available at https://www.rexdb.org/rios-converter/. Applications built on the open-source RexDB platform (e.g., RexStudy) natively support the RIOS standard. More information about the RexDB project can be found at https://www.rexdb.org/.

About the Authors

With funding from the NIH (Grant #1R43-MH106225), the informatics experts at Prometheus Research authored the freely-available, universal standard called RIOS and initial set of conversion tools for the exchange, reuse, and storage of EDC metadata configurations. The original implementation of the standard was referred to as “PRISMH” for the “Portable Research Instrument Standard for Mental Health” and later renamed due to its applicability to domains outside of mental and behavioral health. Webinar(s) and other resources about RIOS are freely available on Prometheus’ website: http://www.prometheusresearch.com. For more Prometheus’-authored works, visit FigShare.