Stage groups

A stage group is a named collection of stages — a way of bundling forms that belong together. Most often they represent a visit: "Baseline visit", "Week 4 visit", "Discharge".

Find them under Stages > Stage groups.

What they are for

Stage groups are an organisational convenience, not a scheduling mechanism. Putting a stage into a group does not change when it becomes available, who can complete it, or whether it counts towards progress — all of that stays on the stage itself.

What they do is group forms in the interface. When you open a participant's record, their responses are presented tab by tab using your stage groups, so a coordinator running a week 4 visit can see exactly the forms that visit involves rather than scrolling the study's entire form list.

If your study has a handful of stages, you may never need them. They earn their keep on studies with several visits and dozens of forms.

Creating a stage group

Click Create new stage group and give it:

  • A name — required, and shown as the tab label, so keep it short.
  • A description — optional, shown underneath in the list.
  • Stages — pick a stage from the dropdown and click Add stage. If the stage repeats, you can also pick a specific recurrence, so "Week 4 visit" contains occurrence 4 of a repeating form rather than all of them. Occurrences are listed as "Recurrence 1", "Recurrence 2" and so on, or by the name the stage gives them if it names them individually. Leave the recurrence unset to include the stage generally.

A stage can only be added to a group once. It can, however, belong to several different groups — a consent form that features in more than one visit is fine.

Editing, ordering and deleting

Edit reopens the same dialog. Add or remove stages, or change the name and description.

Order is set with the up and down arrows on each row, and determines the order the tabs appear in on a participant's record. Put them in visit order.

Delete removes the group only. The stages in it are untouched, along with all their data — you are deleting the grouping, not the forms. That makes stage groups safe to reorganise at any point in a study, unlike most other configuration.

Permissions

To do this You need
View stage groups trial.readStages — also implied by trial.read
Create, edit, reorder and delete stage groups trial.write (or trial administrator)

Like other study configuration, stage groups cannot be changed while the study or database is locked.