To support the clinical aims of the project, the PsyGrid Informatics team has developed a system for clinical data capture and clinical trial management. The system is still being actively developed with the next major release (R4.0) due February 2007. Informatics development is funded until April 2008.

Some of the key features of the PsyGrid system are:

Off-line and on-line data entry	Email notification of follow-ups due
PKI secured with role-based access control	Trend analysis reports
Support fo multiple independent projects	Data anonymisation on import or export
Model driven data set definition	Data import from file or URL
Data entry forms dynamically rendered from data set definition	Data set versioning, publication and resynchronisation
Data review and approve capability	Recruitment reports
Multi-centre remote data entry	Audit trail and data provenance
NHS N3 compatible	Call out to 3rd party application data processors (e.g. Opcrit)
UKCRN accrual reports	Conversion of documents to PDF format for printing
Fully customisable data set defintion including data elements, validation rules and scheduling	High availability deployment, with no single point of failure

Architecture

PsyGrid employs a Service-Oriented Archiecture and is highly modular. All major components are developed as web services using Apache Axis.
The key components of the system are:

• Security - PsyGrid employs a role-based access control system based around the SAML standard. All communciations are secure using PKI. Services are provided for authentication, privilege management and policy enforcement.
  
• Data Repository - a central database for storing clinical information, uses the Hibernate ORM layer and can be used with most RDBMS systems
  
• Randomisation - a service which implements a configurable multi-site, startified, permuted random block length randomiser.
  
• Electronic Screening Log (ESL) - a separate database used for storing patient identifiable information, which can be configured with a security policy different to the data repository.
• ESL Web Interface - provides browser based access to the ESL for looking up patient study numbers from identifiable details or vice-versa. Only provides access to the results of randomisation for non-blind users.
• CoCoA - a Java application intereprets the data set and renders the data collection interface to the user.
• Data Management Web Interface - provides browser based access to data export, reporting and document viewer functions.
• Security Management - a graphical tool which simplifies user account and privilege management
  

Work in Progress

• Data Set Design Tools - a graphical tool which will enable easy creation and editing of data entry forms. Linking to Clinical Terminology Service and data elemenet libraries to foster interoprability between data sets.
• Data Linkage and Analysis - a workbench to simplify link databases such as cesnus data from the Office of National Statistics
• Trial Design and Patient Recruitment - a graphical tool for planning a trial and finding subjects matching the eligibility criteria
• Incoporation of Medical Images and Genetic data to support diagnosis and prognosis at an indivdual level