REDCap: Hosting & Support
Healthcare Data Hosting (HDS)
Your REDCap Server Hosting and Maintenance Solution
Discover our specialized service in healthcare data hosting (HDS) and server maintenance for REDCap, the leading Electronic Data Capture (EDC) platform dedicated to research.
Optimize the creation of your eCRF (Electronic Case Report Form) and electronic data entry on certified healthcare data hosting, to ensure optimal data security.
Contact us for secure REDCap hosting
Working on a REDCap project or planning one soon? Our team is here to offer you the best hosting and support solution.
We guarantee expertise and responsiveness that institutional IT services, often overloaded and unfamiliar with REDCap, may struggle to provide.
👉 Contact us now for a free assessment of your needs.
What is REDCap?
REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is open-source software designed for secure collection and management of clinical and scientific data. Originally developed by Vanderbilt University (United States), it is now used worldwide by hospitals, universities, and research centers.
Designed to meet requirements for confidentiality, traceability, and scientific rigor, REDCap has become essential for electronic data collection (eCRF).
Among its main features:
- Creation of dynamic questionnaires with conditional logic
- Fine-grained user rights management
- Integrated reporting tools
- Export to statistical tools (R, SAS, Stata, SPSS)
- Built-in audit trail
- Complies with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- Additional modules developed by an active community
- Multilingual
- Two-factor authentication
While the software platform itself is free to use (for « non-commercial » research), hosting the REDCap instance quickly raises questions about skills, security, regulatory compliance (particularly GDPR), and data localization.
Why use REDCap in your research projects?
REDCap stands out as an essential solution for:
- Securing sensitive data collection (patients, therapeutic trials, surveys)
- Facilitating multi-center collaboration
- Standardizing data entry processes
- Automating data validations and follow-ups
- Complying with ethical and regulatory frameworks (CNIL, GDPR)
Thanks to its intuitive interface, REDCap can be used by both researchers and non-technical staff.
REDCap and regulatory requirements
REDCap is open-source software developed by Vanderbilt University. It is used in thousands of institutions worldwide. However, REDCap is just a software tool: the security and regulatory compliance of hosting depends on the entity that deploys it.
In France, the answer to the question of mandatory HDS hosting for pseudonymized health data for research purposes remains nuanced. On one hand, Article L.1111-8 of the Public Health Code only requires HDS hosting for care, prevention, or medical-social follow-up activities. On the other hand, CNIL and the Digital Health Agency (ANS) consider that pseudonymization does not change the nature of the data, which therefore remains personal health data, and therefore recommend certified HDS hosting, while citing exemptions to this obligation for research projects unrelated to care.
Ultimately, even when the legal HDS obligation could be legally circumvented in certain specific configurations, using a certified HDS host remains the best guarantee: regulatory compliance, technical security, contractual reliability, and recognition by ethics committees and CNIL. For any personal health data, pseudonymized or not, opting for HDS hosting means adopting a rigorous and anticipatory stance in a constantly evolving regulatory landscape.
For projects processing data not falling under the sensitive or personal data regime, or in case of irreversibly anonymized data, traditional hosting may indeed suffice.
Local hosting vs. external hosting
To host your REDCap instance in compliance with European requirements, two options are available:
- Local installation on your institution’s servers
- External hosting with a competent professional
Each option has advantages but also technical, maintenance, and compliance constraints.
Institutional local hosting
Several European universities or hospitals have installed their own REDCap infrastructure on their internal servers. This solution is suitable if the institution has a competent IT department regarding REDCap and involved in the research conducted by the institution.
- ⚠️Requires significant technical knowledge
- ⚠️ and availability of IT staff for maintenance, updates, and security, which are the institution’s responsibility
External provider hosting
However, in case of lack of IT knowledge and/or availability of internal teams, outsourcing to a competent and certified external provider offers numerous advantages:
- Data security
- Regulatory compliance of servers
- Increased availability and responsiveness
Few companies offer hosting and maintenance solutions for REDCap on dedicated servers, HDS certified and located in France.
Anamorphik is one of these providers, thus offering complete compliance with CNIL requirements while guaranteeing full control of the technical infrastructure.
Our REDCap hosting solutions
Our company offers turnkey REDCap hosting solutions, including:
- Secure servers located in France
- GDPR compliance, HDS certification and ISO 27001 compliance
- 24/7 monitoring, daily backups, regular updates
- Business continuity/disaster recovery plan (BCP/DRP)
💡 Whether you are a research laboratory, hospital, or public institution, we support you to ensure rapid and reliable compliance.
Take advantage of a reliable and secure platform for your electronic data capture needs and optimize your research data management with our health hosting expertise.
If your data is anonymized and you don’t need health hosting, we also offer REDCap hosting solutions without HDS.
Our strengths for your REDCap project
- Security and compliance: certified HDS and dedicated infrastructures, auditable and monitored.
- Technical expertise: a team specialized in Healthcare Data Hosting — including care, research, and web-based applications.
- Proactive server maintenance, ensuring availability, performance, and security of your REDCap platform.
- Personalized, human assistance — not a one-size-fits-all approach.
- Adapted pricing: accessible solutions for public structures, associations, and small research teams.
Summary
Using REDCap to collect health data involves important responsibilities. Choosing certified HDS hosting means protecting your participants’ sensitive data but also complying with French and European regulatory requirements.
If you’re looking for a fast, reliable, and compliant solution to host your REDCap instance, Anamorphik offers a proven HDS infrastructure, with personalized support at every project stage and a tailor-made approach adapted to French and European research constraints.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is free for non-profit institutions (including government and military institutions), or more broadly, for non-commercial research.
Yes, provided it is hosted in an environment that respects security requirements and data localization in Europe. This is the case with our infrastructures.
Yes, but it requires technical skills, dedicated human resources, and constant vigilance on security. This is why many institutions choose outsourcing.
Yes. We offer a migration service to our servers from an existing project or REDCap database hosted elsewhere.
Yes. Since each tool is different, a thorough study is necessary. Our teams can support you in this transition.
REDCap is developed primarily in PHP, with a MySQL database. It can be installed on a LAMP environment or similar. It also supports integrations via REST API.
HDS hosting is a French regulatory framework defined by the Digital Health Agency (ANS), which imposes technical, organizational, and legal requirements on health data hosts. It applies to any entity that hosts identifying health-related data, whether for:
- Clinical research
- Cohort registries
- Current care databases
- Or multicenter observational studies
A certified HDS host is regularly audited by accredited organizations and guarantees:
- Physical and logical security of servers
- Traceability of data access
- Infrastructure resilience (redundancy, backups)
- GDPR compliance, notably through documented and verifiable procedures
NB: Anamorphik acts as a subcontractor for hosting and server maintenance. You are responsible for subscribing to a RedCap license (https://projectredcap.org/partners/join/), in accordance with RedCap’s general terms and conditions (https://projectredcap.org/partners/termsofuse/).
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