Prometheus Research of New Haven has been awarded over $250,000 from the National Institutes of Health to transform the way electronic data capture forms are configured, integrated, and shared for biomedical and behavioral health research. The research is expected to have benefits beyond the medical and mental health fields.
The grant, part of NIH’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, seeks to empower mental health researchers to easily share, reuse, and locate electronic data capture forms across a variety of electronic data capture platforms, according to Promethus Research.
Prometheus is using the funds to create the Research Instrument Open Standard (RIOS), a publicly available, rigorous standard for representing research instruments and eliminates the need for redundant electronic data capture form configuration. As part of the NIH grant, Prometheus Research is also developing a set of adapters to translate instrument configurations between RIOS and the formats used by other popular electronic data capture systems.
“Many [electronic data capture] tools, and especially those used by mental health researchers, are dead-ends from an interoperability standpoint,” said Dr. Frank Farach, staff scientist and director of program management at Prometheus Research, in a statement. “In an ideal world, 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 any EDC tool.”
