Data security and privacy are the minimum requirements for choosing any EDC. Real gains from EDC adoption come from using the technology to support and enforce data collection processes, not merely to digitize them. A well-built EDC confirms eligibility at the moment of assessment, generates the correct forms automatically based on participant responses, flags implausible entries before the field worker moves on, and produces a dataset clean enough to analyze at close. When we benchmarked available tools only one offered protocol enforcement as a feature. That gap is the value unlock.

The problem with most EDC tools isn't that they're bad at what they do. It's that they're built for a specific context — usually a well-funded institution with reliable infrastructure — and then adapted, sometimes poorly, for everything else.