Castor EDC Features

The software is easy to use, and allows for multiple people to work on the same project, whilst still being able to discriminate who worked on what fields. Additionally, after some practice, it is quite simple to build up an eCRF in castor, which can be used for live data storage.

The fact that it is not able to import survey answers. We started using Castor when our study had already started. In order to store data from subjects that had already started our study, all survey answers had to be filled in manually. Also, at this moment, Castor does not warn you when you still have a report open for a subject, it still shows up as 100% complete when all regular fields are filled in. This would be nice to change.

I really like about Castor that it has many different features that can be modified depending on the study, in a more specialized version. It is pretty useful also that all forms are exported together as one, required for the analysis.

I am really happy with Castor right now.

Allows you to view participant data in an organized and efficient way, and the forms are easy to fill out and manage.

it needs a more visible alert when a form is empty, because sometimes you do not notice it and you have to check it again point by point.

I like how smooth it is to switch to different tabs while working on data collection.

I don't like the way dates are input to the data collection part of Castor.

I really like this CRD, it is one of my favorites. It is clean, intuitive and easy to use.

I don't like that every time a change has to be made, a text box appears reminding us of Good Clinical Practices.

After a quick initial learning curve the system is easy to build out without having someone on staff that is an IT expert. Our clinical study managers are able to build out each study with little to no help from Castor. The database is easy to use by both clinical sites and sponsors. The company continues to improve the features of the system and provide webcasts to review the changes and answer user questions. The value can't be beat. As an early-stage start up company we are happy to have found a high-quality compliant system we can afford.

The one feature we feel is lacking is the ability of an investigator to "batch approve" once they have reviewed the data. It is labor intensive to approve each study visit and each record generated. Other systems provide this ability and investigator's expect this from all systems.

Dear Lisa, Thank you for the positive review and for outlining all the aspects of our system that we pride ourselves on! We indeed offer regular webinars, help from our support team, and an extensive online manual with the aim that every user creates a database on their own in no time! Bulk actions is a good point, definitely something we are working on (for records, reports, and surveys!). We are also doing a make-over of the entire navigation in Castor in order to improve the design and intuitiveness of the system and to make that learning curve even steeper! Thank you for the 5 stars! Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

There are many great features about Castor EDC. The most important ones: - The product is extremely easy-to-use; everyone can work with it, the functions of the program are very intuitive. Therefore, the product can be used in clinical trials for data input by different researchers without a intensive and/or long training period. - Castor EDC is very easy to customize to a specific setting; several data structures can be created and different forms of information can be stored. Thanks to this adaptibility, I was able to use Castor for several of my research projects. - data transfer to data-analyzing programs is very easy - Castor customer support is very good; every time I encountered a problem, I got a quick reply and customer support offered handy solutions every time.

There are no features that I miss about this program, or things that I would like to see improved.

The setup of a CRF within Castor EDC is intuitive, enabling us to conduct patient inclusions in a large scale trial with >600 data points within days. Due to the close collaboration between the clinical trial research unit of our academic hospital and Castor, we were able to receive optimal guidance prior to the start of the study, allowing for a smooth start up and easy data acquisition. Support by Castor employees was swift, and regular updates of the software made data input even easier. Exporting of data is super easy, allowing for quick data analysis in other environments such as R. Finally, Castor abides to all GDPR regulations, making it a safe environment to store patient data!

None! Initial "bugs" and slow server speeds were quickly addressed and improved along the way.

The almost intuitive easy nature of the software.

The study ID numbering is a bit clunky. It would also be great to have study visit alarms / out of study visit window warnings.

Dear Bee, Thank you for your review! We love that you love Castor and that you find the system (almost) intuitive :) With our coming redesign of the navigation in Castor, we hope to make it 100% intuitive! This year we will also be working towards a better overview of old vs. new CRF versions, as well as a reporting dashboard that will provide you with better insight into the study progress. Good luck further with your many research studies! Cheers, Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

Castor is very intuitive and easy to use. Per variable/step/phase I can verify the data. Also making queries is very nice, it has multiple steps in closing a query what makes it very clear. What's also great is that gaining access to a database is very simple and easily arranged.

The audit trail cant be printed out, it can only be viewed online. But most of the times the audit trail is too massive anyway to print.

Very user friendly, easy access to online help (email), audit trail available, ease of uploading documents, data editing easily without having to unlock pages constantly

Everytime I stop typing in a field and come back to it 30 s later, the GCP box pops up and ask me why am I making changes. I was just abit slow to type in the data. This is the only issue that is somewhat annoying, having to justify why even though I am not changing the data. Perhaps this box should pop up only if we make changes after we save the page?

It is very user friendly, easy to get acquinted with

Immediate changes also require a justification even though you are just correcting a typo

Being a small non-profit organization stretched for time and resources, finding a secure platform which took into account our small under-resourced status in cost and was easy for me to build and customize was invaluable. Add to that the amazing customer service and I was even happier.

There are 3 things that could be improved: 1. Allowing for more than one dependency on a question. 2. Make automations easier to set up with clearer terminology and instructions. 3. Allow for simple pulling of numbers for a specific field without exporting data (i.e. how many in field x said 'yes')

Professional layout. API to fetch and submit data.

All variables need to be created manually; there is no option to do this programmatically(?)

Hi Wouter, Thank you for your review! Good to hear that you are using our API, this is a great way to integrate Castor with other systems and easily transmit data. If you have a data dictionary (e.g. csv) that you would like to 'import' into Castor, you can contact our support team and we will help you with it - we have some internal applications that allow for this. In the future we hope to make it possible for end-users to do this themselves as well. Thanks again! -Elena Customer Success Manager

Not overly complicated design and user interface for non-drug trials Easy set up, especially of internal data checks Nested forms (records) Visual cleanliness Globally based servers

Users report it being "clunky" and slow to update pages. This is more noticeable towards the end of the day (don't know if that is numbers of people using the system, or a reflection of having been working on it for several hours) It is not possible to filter on data within reports (as you can with records), nor run queries within the system (to find out how many patients have been diagnosed with a specific condition, captured in a report, I have to extract data for all patients, and clean it up in excel before I can run a simple count/filter function. The stats page doesn't allow scrolling, which means I often loose half the information User experience of using the system across different smart phones is variable

Hi Helen, Many thanks for your detailed review! Regarding the slowness issue - this is of course not expected behavior - while we have sometimes seen issues with hospital systems using outdated browsers, firewalls or slow networks, it would be good if we can identify the route cause and find a solution. So please reach out to our support team to further investigate this together! In addition, we will be working on improved reporting in the coming period, so stay tuned! Best regards, Elena Kochova, MD Sr. Customer Success Manager

Castor is easy to use. In designing studies, I like how variables and answers are easily created, and that answers can be re-used for multiple variables. I also really appreciate the feature to have a variable depend on a (hidden) calculation. In using that feature, I have found that https://www.castoredc.com/tools/calculation-helper/ is a great way of testing your calculations are syntactically correct....

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Getting to know Castor takes a bit of time, but it is very helpful to be aware of the structure of Castor, which allows you to fully utilise its potential.

+ Ease of use, it didnt take long to master it. + Castor EDC is supported by many companies as a reliable partner. + Castor keeps updating its product and services in order to keep up with developments in research law and good clinical practice. + No more paper! (Or rather.. less paper) + The ability to create case report forms of measurement instruments for future use in other studies. + Large amount of options for all types of studies.

- The way the database is set up enforces the user to decide how he/she wants her data to be exported. - The system is not really designed for a high amount of measurements per step. It leads to some lagg in inserting data and it will nog let you make entire steps missing when applicable -> meaning you have to tag every single item as missing which is not very efficient. - The use of previously used/exported CRFs is still in development. For instance, only entire steps can be exported for future use though often steps contain multiple instruments or measurements.

Castor is a GDPR compliant tool to capture and store baseline characteristics, patient surveys, and clinical outcomes. It's affordable, easy to set up and easy to use. What I love most about it is that it improves the study quality so much compared to traditional methods of data capturing. I also love all the automatic calculations (e.g. age from date of birth and procedure date) the system can perform. The ePro feature to send out surveys to patients directly is great!

The platform could be even better if it offered functionality to design/structure all variables, definitions, input value options, and calculations in Excel and upload it to Castor. This would make it so much easier to translate (parts) of existing databases to new projects. Also, I missed an option to directly export the database to STATA. Castor currently only supports CSV/Excel/SPSS. Otherwise, no cons.

Hi Sjors, Thank you for your positive review! It's good to hear that you have used Castor for so many multicenter studies and that all users were happy with the platform. We hope you conduct many more successful studies in the future! We actually have an internal method to transform existing 'Excel' databases into Castor and we do offer such transformations. Please get in touch and we can lead you through the process! Best regards, Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

Easy to use, manage and build. Multiple users can easlily work in a case-by-case EDC. Setting authorizations is easy and feedback can be given by means of queries. Data export is easy and complete.

It tends to get slower over time due to pilled up logs which are logged on the background and can be cleared by the team of castor.

CASTOR for me is the answer to electronic data capture. It is easy to use, you have full control, it is safe and data from several sources can be incorporated. Can be used by the investigator, monitor as well as the participant for answering the questionnaires. I also like the fact that the software keeps being developed and better features are added regulary. Communication is excellent.

The help section is sometimes a bit hard to work through. Also would like to have a printable version of the manual (esp. for instructions to people using the ready-made castor forms).

Dear Gabby, Thanks for this great review! We pride ourselves on our platform's security, user-friendliness and multiple functionalities, as well as the responsiveness of our support team, so we are happy to hear that these are the highlights for you as a data manager! We have recently migrated our entire knowledge base, have you checked it out? It can be found at https://helpdesk.castoredc.com. The searchability has improved significantly since! We have also added printable pdf manuals for data entry users, study admins and monitors. We hope these will be useful for you! Thank you! Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

This software is intuitive to use. The company provides video training with all the ins and outs, even though you can work with it without the training. In the past, I had issues with obtaining a calculation for a specific formula and the customer support was so helpful, truly. Responses were almost immediate and my issue was resolved. In addition, the use of records and reports are so helpful when building the CRFs. This product includes EVERYTHING you can find in all of the competing products, including the regulatory requirements, but is so much less expensive that it is not even worth checking out the other companies. This is my go to platform for all of my clients' clinical trials.

Watching the videos... I just want to hop in. I am writing this because I have to, honestly, there is nothing I don't like about this software.

Hi Sharon, Thank you so much for this super positive review and great to have you as a loyal customer! Our goal is to offer a product that covers all features necessary for any medical device or pharma study at a competitive price - so it's good to hear that it has indeed met your company's needs. Best regards, Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

It's really easy setting up the data collection process for your study. I love how you can play around with setting up a study (test study) so you can learn and implement that best data collection process for your study. The customization is great. It's also a great tool for small companies because of the price! Castor also does not charge you until your study goes live, which takes a lot of pressure off of the set up time, which is ultimately the longest and most difficult part when getting started with an EDC system--this gives you time to review with your team.

I wish there was a "save select data export" feature, where you can customize specific data fields to export, save, and re-download them at a later time instead of manually having to customize the fields again. The tutorial/help videos for setting up the study were mostly helpful, but I didn't use many features because of the lack of clarity in how to implement or the purpose of certain data fields. I think a better explanation (or even examples) as to what a "Repeated Measures" function as opposed to a "Add Report" function, for example.

How fast we could get started as Castor is very user friendly. We could build some eCRFs ourselves, and the support provided for the parts we could not do ourselves was very fast, adequate and high quality.

Nothing so far. Some minor features that were not available were customly build for us when requested.

Hi Anne-Floor, Thank you for your all-star review! It makes us extremely happy to hear that you have found Castor so easy to use and valuable for your study! - Elena

It is easy for a non-experienced database builder to create your own database using Castor. The database is easy to use for data-entry, monitoring and creating reports or surveys. You can add a lot of users and adjust the rights for each of the users. As an admin you have a clear overview on the progress of the study in all participating sites and you get a message every time a patient is included in the trial.

Sending out surveys is still a manual task, it would be great if by just entering the participants' email address, the surveys are sent automatically.

Hi Fleur, Thanks for your 5 star review, we really appreciate it! With regards to sending surveys when you add the email address, have you looked at our automation engine? https://helpdesk.castoredc.com/article/44-automatically-send-out-surveys That should hopefully make your life even easier! All the best, Derk Arts, MD PhD CEO Castor EDC