Source: SYSU-JHU Collaboration Program
Written by: Chen Jingxue, Li Liying
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On April 1, 2015, the 4th SYSU Clinical Research Salon took place on North Campus of Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), attracting more than 100 faculty members from SYSU and its affiliated hospitals. The salon was hosted by Prof. Cheng Chao from The First Affiliated Hospital and Associate Professor Guo Yan from the School of Public Health. The main speakers are Associate Professor You Na from the School of Mathematics & Computational Science, Dr. Ma Xinghua from Prof. You’s project team, and Ms. Peng Min from the Breast Tumor Center of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital. All three of them focused on introducing and evaluating REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture), a useful application for building and managing online surveys and databases.

Supported by NIH grants, REDCap is a web-based, metadata-driven software, aiming at helping biomedical researchers manage clinical data in clinical and translational research. As one of the first visiting scholars to The Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Associate Professor You Na successfully imported the REDCap to SYSU when she was doing researches in JHU. By contacting with the REDCap Consortium for the platform development source code, she then converted the system to a Chinese version with the help of her project team.
  Dr. Ma Xinghua, one of the main constructors of the application’s Chinese version, introduced its main functions and operation procedures in detail. Through the Q & A section, audience got a more clear understanding of the REDCap. 
At the end of the Salon, Ms. Peng Min shared her experience in using REDCap as her department is one of the first users of this application. She also raised some practical questions. The REDCap project team responded that by catering to users’ need and with the help of users’ sincere feedback, they would improve its system with more user-friendly design. 

SYSU Clinical Research Salon is an academic activity initiated by the visiting fellows of the SYSU-JHU Collaboration Program. They hope that the salon can bring the advanced study method and positive research atmosphere to SYSU and serve as a bridge to connect all the faculty members who are interested in clinical research. The academic salon is scheduled to take place on the first Wednesday of every month. Online videos of the salons are also available on the website: http://lecture.sysu.edu.cn/. For more information about the salon, you may visit the webpage on SYSU North Campus website: http://med.sysu.edu.cn/ztbd/sysuhz/index.htm.