[Electronic data capture. Impact on the quality of the clinical research]

Electronic data capture helps improving the quality of clinical research; mainly yielding a more reliable data collection process, but also introducing new resources for controlling the execution of clinical trials and facilitating the monitoring tasks. The protocol can be implemented rather than followed, and tools are at hand to help minimising the human error. The principal difficulty in the use of the electronic data capture lays in a more complex set up. This forces the adaptation of the people involved in the execution of clinical trials to a different workflow. In the future, most of the clinical research will use electronic data capture systems, and the paper shall be left for a few particular cases.