I've been saying to clients for years that spreadsheets are evil. They can start out as a good idea, especially when you just have a few records to manage. And they are highly accessible - there is almost no learning curve to typing values into cells. But it doesn't take long before someone decides to use Excel as a tool manage large volumes of data and that's when things can turn nasty.
Following on from our involvement with the hugely successful HCV Research UK national study, funded by the UK Medical Research Council, which used a web based system developed by Illuminaries to collect data in more than 10,000 participants, we have developed bespoke browser based apps for a number of other clinical research studies.