Study execution

Study execution provides you with a set of features needed to conduct a study. For a start, it lists all participating subjects of a study. Most importantly it allows you to obtain pseudonyms for each participant as described here: Get the pseudonyms of a subject.

The List tab simply shows all participants regardless of whether they have an appointment. For each entry it will present a color coded reliability score, the appointment states and assigned tags. The Calendar tab allows you to view all participants with appointments (week, month and list views). The By pseudonym tab offers to find a participant by specifying study specific pseudonyms (see Find subject by study pseudonym).

The News tab offers a mail form to contact all interested participants on recent study outcomes, study specific events or similar. After sending such a message and if applicable Castellum will send you an additional mail that lists all participants who want to be informed via postal mail.

The Tags tab allows you to edit, add or delete tags that should be used to tag participants during study execution in order to support your workflows or the like.

The Progress tab gives insights on the current number of participants and appointments.

Export attributes of participants

You may want to initially populate your scientific data with a listing of known attributes of the participants. Therefore, Castellum allows you to export attributes of all participants sorted by a pseudonym.

Note

This feature only allows to export those attributes that are specified in study management as Exportable recruitment attributes.

You are only allowed to export attributes if your privacy level is matching the participant’s.

If there is more than one pseudonym list for this study, you will have to select the pseudonym list that should be used for export.

The export will provide a zipped file containing of an attributes file and a schema file that allows you to comprehend the actual values in the attributes file. Depending on your Castellum setup the attributes file will be provided as custom json or tsv (as BIDS compliant participants file) file.

Conductor Annotations on participants

The participant details in study execution allow you to add additional hints that may be important for you or other conductors when working with this participant. The Hints tab offers you

to specify the interest in future study outcomes. All interested participants can be contacted later via the News tab in study execution.
select Execution tags that may help to comply with processes or similar. If the standard tags are not sufficient for your workflow click on Manage tags to add, edit or delete them.
mark the participant as unreliable. This information will be used for future study recruitments or study executions allowing other Castellum users to assess a potential subject and take precautions if necessary.

Get a list of today’s appointments

On the front page, receptionists can click on and open the Today’s appointments page. There they will see a table whose rows represent each appointment of the same day, ordered in chronological order, with the following information on each column:

Time: This column shows at which time each appointment starts.
Name: This column contains the name of each subject.
Study: This column contains the name of the study the subject is participating in.
Session: This column contains the name of the session of the study the subject is attending at.
Contact person: This column contains the name and telephone number of the person(s) responsible for this study, who are to be contacted if the receptionist needs additional information, e.g. the name and location of the room the appointment will be held on, in order to direct the subject accordingly.
Assigned conductors: This column contains the names of the assigned conductors for this session of the study.