Web-based distributed data management in the childhood asthma research and education (CARE) network.

A well-designed distributed data management application provides an efficient, effective process to collect quality data in multicenter clinical trials. This paper describes the web-based clinical center data management application that was developed by the Data Coordinating Center of the Childhood Asthma Research and Education (CARE) Network. A series of modules was designed to allow the clinical staff at the remote clinical centers to enter clinical trial data, correct entry errors, respond to queries from the Data Coordinating Center, and submit data corrections for previously entered data to ultimately provide a clean and accurate dataset for analysis.