WEB-RADR charges into battle

Hugo's “morne plaine!” was not so dismal for the participants in the WEB-RADR WP3 working group, who met, just over 200 years after a more confrontational gathering nearby, at the wonderful UCB site in Braine in l'Allued close to Waterloo, outside Brussels. Invited by Stephanie Bodin Pärsinen of UCB we'd gathered to dig into the details of the mobile ICSR reporting app which is one of the deliverables in the WEB-RADR project.

The idyllic site was scattered over a large area with lots of green grass, trees, flowers and ponds as well as swans and rabbits. The meeting room was lovely with trees just outside of the big panorama windows and rabbits jumping around on the grass.

But we were there for work: Phil Tregunno (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency), Linda Härmark (Lareb), Darko Krnić (Agency for Medicinal Products and Medical Devices of Croatia), Magnus Wallberg (Uppsala Monitoring Centre) Sieta de Vries (University Medical Centre Groningen) and Lucas Baptista and Kyra McKenna (Epidemico), alongside our host Stephanie.

We were looking at the details of the planned reporting app – such as what information to ask for, in what order and how to ask for it. More importantly though, was our determination to add extra value to the app, compared to paper-based and normal web-based reporting, leading to discussions around functions not very common as of today. Functions we wanted to include before the app's launch in Croatia and the Netherlands, such as attachments, images, the opportunity to give follow-up information, and the possibility to use the 'dictate' functionality already available in most modern smart-phones. Clever ways of asking for complicated information, for instance dosing, were discussed at length.

We had very interesting, sometimes tough skirmishes over the two days, but we also had much fun together in the group and the value of meeting face-to-face should never be underestimated.

The meeting days were long and we worked really hard but Linda and myself took the opportunity to take a morning run before breakfast to the famous landmark at Waterloo, the Lion Hill, where Napoleon met his destiny (with a bad outcome – for him). The outcome for WEB-RADR only time can tell, but the general impression and feeling of all was that we in the WEB-RADR project will be on the winning side!