Sites

A site is a location taking part in your study — a hospital, clinic, GP practice, or a virtual site for remote participants. Sites let you separate participants and staff by location, which is what makes multi-site and delegated working possible.

Find them under Sites.

If your study runs from a single location, you may not need sites at all. They become essential the moment you have staff who should only see their own location's participants.

What sites give you

  • Scoped access for staff. Someone can be given permissions on one site only, and will see that site's participants, files and packs — and nothing else. See Personnel.
  • Site-restricted forms. A stage can be limited to particular sites, so different locations can use different form variants.
  • Filtering and reporting. The participants table filters by site, and the Participant journey panel breaks its figures down by site.
  • Message boards. Each site has a staff-to-staff board, with an option to broadcast an announcement to all of them.
  • Regulatory tracking. Approval and activity status per site, so you can see where each one is in the start-up process.
  • Monitoring. A record of monitoring visits at each site and the issues raised at them, where that feature is enabled.

Creating a site

Click Create a new site. The form is in three parts.

About your site

Field Notes
Site ID A unique identifier, e.g. SITE-001. This is what appears in exports
Name A unique, human-readable name
Description Optional
Site logo or image Optional; shown as a thumbnail in the sites list

Contact information — key contact name, email and phone, and a full postal address including country. All optional, but recommended: this is where staff look when they need to reach a site.

Regulatory and approval

  • Relevant IRB/EC — None required, Local IRB/EC, or Central IRB/EC.
  • Approval status — Pending, On-hold, Selected, or Rejected.
  • Activity status — Pending selection, Selected, Active (recruiting), Active (not recruiting), Closed to recruitment, or Closed.

These statuses are for your own tracking and reporting. Setting a site to Closed does not stop data being collected there — it records where the site is in its lifecycle, and Trialflare does not enforce anything from it.

The sites list

Each row shows the site's ID and name, its location with a country flag, its IRB type, approval and activity statuses, the number of open monitoring issues, and any unread messages on its board. Search filters by ID, name or city.

From each row you can open the site's Messages board, its Monitoring area (where the feature is enabled for your team), or Edit it.

Announce to all sites posts one message to every site board at once — useful for a protocol amendment or a study-wide notice.

Assigning participants to sites

Participants are assigned to sites from the participants table, not from here. A participant can belong to more than one site.

Two routes:

  • On a participant's row, use the + button in the Sites column, or the × on an existing site tag to remove them.
  • Select several participants with the checkboxes and use Add to site in the bulk menu.

Staff registering participants under a site-scoped permission have their new participants added to that site automatically.

The site message board

Every site has its own message board — a shared thread where trial administrators and that site's staff can talk to each other. It is staff-to-staff: participants never see it, and it is entirely separate from participant messaging.

Open it from Messages on the site's row, or from the Site message boards panel on the trial overview.

Posting and reading

The board works like a group chat. Your own posts appear on the right, everyone else's on the left, each attributed to its author. Posts from trial administrators carry an Admin badge and a subtle tint, so site staff can tell head-office messages from their colleagues' at a glance.

You can attach files to a post — they are stored with the site and visible to anyone who can read the board. Links in messages are made clickable automatically.

The board shows the 100 most recent messages and refreshes itself every 30 seconds while open, so an ongoing conversation updates without reloading the page.

Unread counts

Unread badges appear next to each board in the sites list, on the trial overview panel, and are refreshed every 30 seconds. Opening a board marks it read for you — because a board has many readers, each person has their own read position rather than a shared one.

Announcing to all sites

Announce to all sites — on the sites list, or from within any board — posts the same message to every site board in the study at once. It is the right tool for a protocol amendment, a study-wide reminder, or a newsletter.

Broadcasts are marked with a Broadcast badge so recipients know it went to everyone. Each site keeps its own thread, so replies stay with the site that made them rather than turning into one study-wide conversation.

You can attach files to an announcement in the same way as to a single-site post — use Attach in the announcement window. The attachments appear on every site's copy of the message, and are visible to anyone who can read those boards. You can send an announcement that is nothing but attachments, with no message text.

Email and push notifications

Email notifications are opt-in, and nobody is subscribed by default. Each person who wants them must open the board and click Subscribe to updates; Unsubscribe turns them off again. The subscription is per board, so someone overseeing four sites subscribes on each one they want to hear about.

Subscribers receive an email whenever anyone else posts to that board, containing a preview of the message and a link to log in and reply. A broadcast sends one email per person, not one per site, even if they are subscribed to several of the affected boards.

Push notifications behave differently: they are sent to every reader of the board, whether or not they have subscribed to emails. The board exists to reach staff who are away from their desk, so this is deliberate. There is no per-board push setting — someone who wants no push notifications turns them off for the app as a whole.

You are never notified about your own posts, and nobody is notified about a board they cannot read.

Worth saying at study start-up. Because email is opt-in, a board can look ignored simply because nobody has subscribed. When you onboard site staff, ask them to open their board and subscribe.

Message board permissions

To do this You need
Read one site's board site.readSiteMessages on that site
Read every board in the study trial.readSiteMessages
Post to one site's board site.writeSiteMessages on that site
Post to any board, and broadcast to all sites trial.writeSiteMessages

Site staff typically hold the site.* pair for their own site and nothing more, which gives them their board and no visibility of any other. Trial administrators typically hold the trial.* pair.

Site monitoring

Monitoring tracks your monitoring activity at each site — the visits themselves, and any findings that come out of them. It is available where the site monitoring feature is enabled for your team, and is opened from Monitoring on the site's row.

Monitoring activities

An activity is one piece of monitoring work — most often a visit. Add monitoring activity records:

Field Notes
Monitoring ID Your own reference, e.g. MV-001
Category MV (monitoring visit) or SSV (site selection visit)
Priority Low, Medium or High
Status Pending or Completed
Scheduled date and Duration (days) When the visit is planned for, and how long it runs
Completed date Filled in once the visit has happened
Assignees The people responsible
Notes Free text — your visit report

The list shows every activity at the site with its ID, who created it, its assignees, category, priority, scheduled date, duration, status and issue count. Search by text, and filter by category or priority. Activities with nobody assigned are badged Unassigned so they do not get lost.

Assignment notifications

When you assign someone to an activity, they are emailed automatically with a link to it. If the activity has a scheduled date, the email includes a calendar invitation (invite.ics) covering the scheduled dates, with the site's full address as the location — so the visit lands straight in their calendar with somewhere to drive to.

This is why filling in the address on the site record is worth the two minutes. Adding assignees later notifies only the people newly added, not everyone already on it.

Issues

An issue is a finding raised against a monitoring activity. Open an activity and use Raise an issue:

Field Options
Name or description What was found
Category Informed consent, eSource, or ePro
Severity Minor, Major or Critical
Status Unresolved or Resolved
GCP non-compliance Yes / No
Protocol non-compliance Yes / No
Assignees Who is responsible for resolving it

The two non-compliance flags are recorded separately from severity, so a finding can be marked as a protocol deviation independently of how serious you judge it to be.

Assigning someone to an issue emails them, as with activities.

Issues surface in three places: on the activity itself, as an issue count on the site's row in the sites list, and — for people assigned to them — in the For you list on the trial overview. That last one is what stops open findings being forgotten between visits.

Monitoring permissions

Monitoring is trial administrator only, throughout. Viewing activities, creating and editing them, raising and editing issues, and deleting any of it all require trial.admin on the study or trials.manage at team level.

There is no site-scoped or read-only monitoring permission, so site staff cannot see the monitoring record of their own site, and a monitor who should see nothing else in the study cannot currently be given monitoring access alone. Assign monitoring work to people who already hold trial administrator access.

Deleting a site

Deleting a site removes it and unassigns every participant from it. The participants themselves, and all their data, are untouched — they simply no longer belong to a site.

Consider what else references the site first. Stages restricted to it, and staff whose only permissions are scoped to it, will need attention afterwards.

Permissions

To do this You need
View sites trial.readSites — also implied by trial.read
Create and edit sites trial.writeSites (or trial-wide write access)
Delete a site Trial administrator
Assign participants to a site trial.write
Read and post to message boards See Message board permissions
View or manage monitoring Trial administrator — see Monitoring permissions

Site-scoped staff permissions — site.access, site.read, site.readParticipants, site.registerParticipants and the rest — are granted per person under Personnel. They are listed in full in Roles and permissions.