A WORLD-WIDE WEB-BASED USER-INTERFACE FOR A DATA MANAGEMENT-SYSTEM FOR USE IN MULTIINSTITUTIONAL CLINICAL-TRIALS DEVELOPMENT AND EXPERIMENTAL OPERATION OF AN AUTOMATED PATIENT REGISTRATION AND RANDOM ALLOCATION SYSTEM

We have employed the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to develop an automated patient registration an d random allocation system for use in a multi-institutional clinical t rial. We made it available on-line to World Wide Web clients in each h ospital through a user friendly graphical user interface. During exper imental operation, the physicians found it satisfactory from the viewp oint of both ease of operation and response time. For the development of a graphical user interface in a network-based information system fo r use in multi-institutional clinical trials, HTTP/HTML has several ad vantages over an ordinary client-server model. Therefore, we concluded that we would adopt HTP/HTML for the construction of user interfaces for physicians in each spital and for data managers in our coordinatin g center. (C) Elsevier Science Inc. 1996.