Although electronic medical records (EMRs) are now widely used, multicenter clinical studies still collect data using EDCs, which are separate from EMRs, necessitating the du-plication of medical and clinical research data input at clin-ical sites. We solved this problem by establishing a network infrastructure between Osaka University Hospital and other affiliated hospitals in the Osaka area, and by introducing a clinical data collection system that collects clinical infor-mation for research purposes directly from EMRs.
In addition, an image information collection system was in-troduced to automatically collect images for research from picture archiving and communication system (PACS) at each hospital. Then, in order to support research that collects blood and pathological samples, we introduced a sample information management system that issues a sample ID linked to the subject identification code.
A network infrastructure was established among 19 hospitals, a clinical data collection system was embedded in EMRs, 13 hospitals implemented an image information collection sys-tem and 7 hospitals implemented a sample information col-lection system.
Since 2013, 26 clinical studies have been undertaken using this system and data for 8,679 cases have been collected. In-corporating the system to collect clinical research data in EMRs has proven to be an efficient way to collect data for research.