REDCap API Guide

Welcome

This guide was developed by a team of epidemiologists at the Washington State Departmentof Health. In this role, we were often tasked with developing data pipelines between REDCap and other agency data systems. These pipelines require custom transformation and an in-depth understanding of the data-types output by REDCap project. While REDCap is very widely used with ample training material on project design and customization, there is not much content specific to informatics and technical administrators. Searching for answers have even led to results like: “please consult informatics specialist in your organization”. After lots of trial and error and consulting among ourselves, this guide is the result. We hope to clearly illustrate the relationship between the data structures within REDCap (question type, instruments, events etc.,) to the resulting data format when exported to json or csv. Lastly, we provide code samples in R and Python to effectively interact with the REDCap features that the API provides. We hope it is helpful in your data processing and analytics journey.