Information technology for longitudinal birth cohorts

Developing computer-based information systems to manage data in a longitudinal birth survey is a challenging task. There are many elements to such a system and good planning and design is essential to produce a system capable of maintaining and providing information both to manage the study and to facilitate research. There are many options and routes that can be taken. Finding the best can be difficult. The key to a good system is to talk to its users, define the operational parameters and plan as much flexibility as is possible.