A Walkthrough of how Diary Schedules Work
This article expands on concepts initially covered in the article on configuring epro studies to build a full understanding of the flexibility in ePRO form deployment options. (Specifically this section). It's recommended to understand those fundamentals before reading this article.
Diaries are the recommended method for delivering surveys or forms to Participants as action items to complete. A diary schedule is simply a diary configuration consisting of one or more forms that need to be deployed to Participants at a specific time interval or on specific days of the week for a pre-defined period of time. For example, a survey that needs to be completed everyday for 7 days prior to the 1 month follow up visit interval.
How a diary schedule in a study is applied in a study
Based on how a diary is configured, when the defined diary trigger date is saved for a Participant, TrialKit builds and stores the diary schedule(s) behind the scenes. This is a timeline table of all the forms that will need to be deployed to that specific Participant.
If the subject is not a Participant user in TrialKit and a diary schedule is triggered to be built, the trigger form will receive an error. This is the system telling you it cannot build a schedule for a Participant that does not exist.
The diary schedules can be accessed within each subject's casebook.
Web Browser:
Mobile App:
Within this area, a specific diary can be selected above the table to view the corresponding schedule, if one exists for the current Participant.
As shown above, the purpose of this table is to display what is expected of a given diary schedule for that Participant and how well they have been keeping up with their form submissions over time.
Note: A diary schedule is different from an event schedule. Event schedules are intended for use in event follow up scenarios, where the "event" is something that the Participant will trigger at any time. Read more here about event schedules.
When the Diary Schedule is not Created
There are a few scenarios where the timeline cannot be built:
- The diary frequency is set as zero, or always available.
- The Participant's study exit form has been entered with a date that precedes the diary start.
- The form that starts the diary is not yet known. For example, if a diary is set to start when a date on the screening form is saved, but that date has not yet been entered. This means TrialKit cannot build the timeline for that diary until that date is saved.
Diary Notifications
Since the diary schedules drive notifications that Participants receive, there is a helpful report to see which notifications are pending and sent across the whole study. If a Participant is missing many of their forms, it could be due to notification reminders not being received. This report will show if TrialKit has sent those notifications.
Access is dependent on user having permissions for eDiaries > Interval Diary Notifications Report and/or the Event Diary Notifications Report.
These reports are currently available via the mobile app and coming soon to the web. They are found under the Reports Menu.