CONSENSUS: A Shiny application of Dementia evaluation and reporting for the KU ADC Longitudinal Clinical Cohort Database.

Abstract

Background: The University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Disease Center (KU ADC) maintains several large databases to track participant recruitment, enrollment, and capture various research related activities. It is challenging to manage and coordinate all the research related activities. One of the crucial activities involves capturing the data and maintaining high data quality, which ensures data reusability and reproducibility.Methods: To effectively manage the cohort, the KU ADC utilizes a combination of open source Electronic Data Capture (EDC) (i.e. REDCap), along with other homegrown data management and visualization systems developed using R-studio and Shiny.Results: In this manuscript, we describe the method and utility of the user-friendly dashboard that was developed for the rapid reporting of dementia evaluations along with data visualization, which allows clinical researchers to summarize recruitment metrics, automatically generate letters to both participants and health care providers, and depict other key metrics, which ultimately help optimize workflows. Conclusions: We believe this general framework would be beneficial to any institution for capturing and maintaining similar longitudinal databases for reporting and summarizing key metrics pertaining to their research.