ReviewR: A light-weight and extensible tool for manual review of clinical records

Objectives: Manual record review is a crucial step for electronic health record (EHR)-based research, but it has poor workflows and is error prone. We sought to build a tool that provides a unified environment for data review and chart abstraction data entry.

Materials and methods: ReviewR is an open-source R Shiny application that can be deployed on a single machine or made available to multiple users. It supports multiple data models and database systems, and integrates with the REDCap API for storing abstraction results.

Results: We describe two real-world uses and extensions of ReviewR. Since its release in April 2021 as a package on CRAN it has been downloaded 2,204 times.

Discussion and conclusion: ReviewR provides an easily accessible review interface for clinical data warehouses. Its modular, extensible, and open source nature afford future expansion by other researchers.