Flexible Database Platform for Biomedical Research with Multiple User Interfaces and a Universal Query Engine

Biomedical research on human subjects often requires a large amount of data to be collected by personal interviews, Internet based questionnaires, lab measurements or by extracting data from paper or electronic health records. This data needs to be stored, analyzed and interpreted in a comprehensive manner. There is a great need for user-friendly software systems that allow to design and launch such data collection initiatives quickly, securely and reliably. We have designed a flexible software system that enables creating such data collection and management projects. Qure Data Management platform described in this paper contains tools for dynamic designing of data models and electronic questionnaires, multiple user interfaces for data entry and a universal query engine for filtered output. The platform enables to make database and questionnaire changes on the fly without any manual database table change. The data repository is based on the entity-attribute-value with classes and relationships (EAV/CR) approach which allows flexible storage and analysis of data from multiple studies. Although aimed at biomedical research, the software architecture is flexible and can be used for various different data collection and management projects.