The system is freely distributed to promote the collection of standard, well structured data suitable for research and multi-institution collaboration.
Caisis was designed around structured chronological patient histories which could be displayed to clinicians and processed by computer algorithms.
[1] The system was initiated in the Department of Urology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in 2002 and has been actively developed by BioDigital Systems and a number of other institutions worldwide.
It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is entirely web based; written mainly in C#, HTML, and JavaScript it runs on the .Net Framework.
Although it is widely used in cancer research the framework allows rapid adoption for collecting data on a multitude of disease states.