A medical dictionary is the standardized vocabulary your coders assign terms from. You upload it once for the whole platform, and every study can then use it. There is nothing to re-upload per study.
đ Prerequisite: Medical coding dictionaries on your platform role. Access lets you see the dictionaries, Edit lets you upload, deprecate and delete them.
You also need your own MedDRA license. Datacapt ships no dictionary content: you download the packages from the MedDRA website with your own subscription credentials.
Which dictionaries you can load
MedDRA is the international reference dictionary for adverse events and medical conditions, and it is currently the only dictionary type available in Datacapt. Others will be added later, and the pickers throughout the product are already built to accept them.
Upload a dictionary
đ ď¸ Step by step guide
Download the MedDRA package, a ZIP file, from the MedDRA website. Note the password, which is provided separately from the download.
Open Global Settings, then Dictionaries.
Click Upload dictionary.
Complete the form, using the table below.
Leave Status on Active if the dictionary should become selectable as soon as processing finishes.
Field | Required | What to enter |
Type | Yes | The dictionary the package comes from. Only MedDRA today. |
Name | Yes | The label your data managers will see in the dictionary picker. Must be unique across the platform. Use a self-describing convention such as |
Dictionary | Yes | The MedDRA package exactly as downloaded. ZIP, 100 MB maximum. |
Password | Yes | The password that opens the ZIP. MedDRA packages are always encrypted. |
Publication date | No | The date MedDRA published the release. Purely informative, shown as a column. |
Status | Toggle | Active by default, meaning selectable in mappings as soon as processing finishes. Switch it off to load a dictionary without yet exposing it to your data managers. |
Version and Language are deliberately not asked. They are read from the package during processing and displayed in the table, so they always match the file and can never be mistyped.
â ď¸ Warning: upload the package exactly as delivered. Any package that has been unzipped, renamed, edited or repackaged fails processing, and so does a wrong password or a missing file. A half-loaded dictionary is never left selectable.
Processing takes a few minutes. The row shows Uploading, then becomes Active, or Upload failed with the reason. It cannot be used in a mapping until processing succeeds.
How versions and languages work
One dictionary is one language and one version. MedDRA 29.0 in English and in French means two uploads and two rows.
Several versions can be Active at once, and that is intended. MedDRA publishes about two releases a year, and a long study spans them.
Uniqueness is checked on Type, Version and Language. Re-uploading the same release in the same language is blocked and you are pointed at the existing row. The name must be unique too.
The Japanese package is the heaviest MedDRA distribution, so it is the one most likely to meet the 100 MB limit.
Deprecate or delete a dictionary
Deprecating removes a dictionary from the picker without touching anything already coded. Deleting removes it entirely, and is only possible if it was never used.
Action | What it does |
Deprecate | Stops new mappings selecting it. Codes already assigned are untouched, and existing mappings keep working. |
Delete | Only available for a dictionary used in no mapping at all. It is a hard delete. A dictionary used in at least one mapping cannot be deleted: deprecate it instead. |
đĄ Tip: deprecation is always a deliberate decision. Uploading a newer MedDRA release does not deprecate the previous one, and nothing prompts you. Decide as a team when studies should stop starting on an older version, and deprecate it then.
Uploads, deprecations and deletions are all recorded in the platform audit trail, under the event type Dictionary.
đđť Next step
Set up medical coding for your study
What medical coding is, and how it works in Datacapt
Read the platform audit trail