Introduction: The adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) in emergency departments (EDs) has changed the way that healthcare information is collected, charted, and stored. A challenge for researchers is to determine how EMRs may be leveraged to facilitate study data collection efforts. Our objective is to describe the use of a unique data collection system leveraging EMR technology and to compare data entry error rates to traditional paper data collection.
Conclusion: DP data collection is a feasible means of data collection. DP data forms maintain all study data within the secure EMR environment, obviating the need to maintain and collect paper data forms.