case-e: Clinical Trial Data Management Tool
case-e is an open-source electronic case report form (eCRF) system for designing clinical trials, managing study workflows, and recording structured clinical research data.
Clinical trials require more than data collection. Research teams need to define protocols, participant groups, visits, assessments, and data collection requirements in ways that are consistent, regulatory-compliant, and transparent. case-e is a self-contained electronic case report form (eCRF) system that combines these tasks into one workflow that researchers and clinicians can deploy “out of the box”. By organizing data capture around a study protocol and its planned assessments, case-e connects with ABCD-J’s wider goals of FAIR data management by supporting transparent workflows from study setup through to data collection and export.
Researchers can create studies from scratch or utilize templates. As a configurable data capture platform with an interactive form builder, teams can define what to collect in reusable and study-specific data fields without requiring separate implementations for each study. Alignment with standardized ontologies and built-in validation rules help teams collect consistent, complete, and validated data. Study configurations and recorded data are securely stored in backend storage.
case-e is developed as a modular frontend-backend application, separating the user interface, API, and data logic to support maintainability and further development. The platform draws on DataLad Concepts, a simple yet powerful metadata schema, for structured data collection. Its support for BIDS-oriented exports can help prepare study data for downstream analysis and interoperability with research workflows.
case-e is available as a hosted eCRF service at https://ecrf.inm7.de/ for use within ABCD-J platform workflows. It also supports a standalone version for local or independent deployment, available from the case-e repository.