Benefits of form versioning
Picture a fully developed CRF. The form layout is pristine, the validation rules are working exactly the way you want them to, and the field data maps directly to your database tables.
What more can you ask for?
Unfortunately, forms hardly ever stay the same throughout the course of a clinical trial or a research study. Forms frequently need to adapt to new data points that were unforeseen during the protocol definition phase. So how can we handle this?
We could go ahead and naively make the new changes, but what happens if the change asks for a field to be deleted? Even if we just hide the field and keep the previous underlying data, how can we display the data that was captured now that the field is missing from the form?
One solution for this is form versioning. The ability to load alternate versions of a form is a frequently overlooked feature when designing a system to handle CRFs for a clinical trial, forms for a research study, or generally any forms that tend to change.
Form versioning allows us to:
- Retrieve and display data even if the field is no longer part of the current version of the form.
- A dropdown list’s items can be added, removed, or changed and we’ll always be able to retrieve exactly what items were present before changes were made.
- Keep the validation rules (edit checks) specific to a specific version of the form.
- Tell customers that mid-study changes are a breeze because the form versioning technology keeps mid-study changes isolated from existing data.
Next time you’re designing a system that stores CRFs or basically stores form data, it may pay to integrate form versioning into your system. It definitely saved me a lot of time. Although I can’t say mid-study changes are my favorite thing in the world, I can say that form versioning makes mid-study changes a whole lot easier.
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