A research information system (RIS) for breast cancer genetics

Abstract

In healthcare great quantities of patient's data are collected for healthcare and administrative/financial purposes. Some of these data would be very useful for potential research, however, for any serious research, uniform and standardised data are needed which are normally scattered among many different electronic and also paper based information data sources. We had a similar problem in our breast cancer genetics study, so a decision was made to develop a simple and lightweight web based research information system (RIS) which would allow user friendly data input, search, edit and export with low maintenance costs. For development our in-house system for automatic application generation (AAGIP) was used. Developed research information system is secure (all data between server and clients are encrypted by using 256-bit SSL protocol and database on server is periodically backuped), highly compatible (it was tested with number of popular browsers like Mozilla/Firefox, IE, Opera, Chrome, Safari...), fast (doesn't use any high demanding graphical gadgets), userfriendly and allows (international) users simple data input (in local languages by using Unicode UTF-8 standard) and data usage/export for different simple or advanced analyses. © 2010 International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering.