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REDCapCAST package

REDCap Castellated data handling when using repeated instruments.

This package is a fork of pegeler/REDCapRITS. The REDCapRITS represents great and extensive work to handle castellated REDCap data in different programming languages. This fork is purely minded on R usage and includes a few implementations of the main REDCap_split function.

The main goal for this project was to allow for a “minimal data” approach by allowing to filter records, instruments and variables in the export to only download data needed. I think this approach is desireable for handling sensitive, clinical data. No similar functionality is available from similar tools (like REDCapR or REDCapTidieR). Please refer to REDCap-Tools for other great tools.

Use and immprovements

This package is primarily relevant for working with longitudinal projects and/or projects using repeated instruments. Here is just a short descirption of the main functions:

  • REDcap_split(): Works largely as the original REDCapRITS::REDCap_split(). It takes a REDCap dataset and metadata (data dictionary) to split the data set into a list of dataframes of instruments.

  • read_redcap_tables(): wraps the use of REDCapR::redcap_read() with REDCap_split() to ease the export of REDCap data.

  • redcap_wider(): pivots each data frame with repeated instruments to a wide format utilizing the tidyr::pivot_wider() from the tidyverse.

  • easy_redcap(): combines secure API key storage with the keyring-package, focused data retrieval and optional widening. This is the recommended approach for easy data access and analysis.

Compared to the original REDCapRITS, all matching functions are improved to accept column naming of REDCap data from manual download or API export.

Future

The plan with this package is to be bundled with a Handbook on working with REDCap from R. I plan to also include functionality to assist in casting (yes, pun intended) the initial REDCap database.

Installation

The package is available on CRAN. Install the latest version:

install.packages("REDCapCAST")

Install the latest version directly from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("agdamsbo/REDCapCAST")