Our story

written by Sebastian Schönherr on July 15, 2020

On March 16th, Austria went into a strict lockdown due to COVID-19. Only two days later, on March 18th, we got a call from Florian Kronenberg, head of the Institute of Genetic Epidemiology: A team of experts from the Department of Internal Medicine are planning a COVID-related, multicentric study and are wondering if we can design a electronic questionnaire (eCRF) from scratch and set up a cloud-based system for data collection. Time was the limiting factor.

Within hours, a Zoom meeting with the study team in Munich and Innsbruck and the Competence Center for Clinical Trials has been set up. Only one day later, on March 19th, the initial eCRF consisting of >150 variables was ready to test, patient randomization integrated and accounts for >130 users in >15 centers across Austria and Germany prepared.

Going live with an important study within days requires confidence in the software and a well functioning team in the background, especially when working from home. Of course, the idea of developing a eCRF system started long before March 19th. For one of our own studies, offline data collection in combination with a cloud synchronization mechanism was required, and no other system had the functionality we needed. Also in the years after this initial use case, we never discovered the system we would love to work with: Intuitive, simple and hiding the technical complexity from end users.

Learning from each use-case, COVID was the last stress test we needed to realize how important and crucial a modern eCRF system like ours is for studies in 2020.

Today we are thrilled to announce Askimed, the next generation eCRF system for medical studies in the cloud. It includes all features required to perform state-of-the-art clinical studies or registries and puts the focus on the collaborative aspects in a study.

Over the years, we had the chance to learn from leading experts performing epidemiological and clinical studies and are now able to provide a modern, intuitive and smart software solution to collect data. We provide Askimed both as a hosted platform at the Medical University of Innsbruck and also for on-premise installations.

In the upcoming articles, we want to share with you the process of building a study from scratch and introduce some of our use cases. For now, we would be excited to learn more about your use case and see if Askimed is a good fit. Contact us directly or follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.

 

Sebastian Schönherr

Sebastian is a computational biologist and co-leads the Askimed project. He loves working at the intersection between computational genetics and computer science and is involved...