Trial overview

The Overview is the first page you see when you open a study. It is designed to answer two questions at a glance: what needs my attention today? and how is the study progressing overall?

What you see depends on your permissions. The progress figures described below are only shown to users with read access to the study.

What is on the page

For you lists the items assigned to you in this study — tasks, queries and site monitoring issues — ordered by when they are due. If you have nothing outstanding, the section says so. Above them, if you are a member of any of the study's sites, a card for each takes you straight to the site's page. Administrators who can see every site but aren't members of any find them under Sites instead.

Set-up prompts appear while a study is still being built, guiding you through adding study information, data types and stages. They disappear once each step is done.

Key information shows the headline counts for the study: registered participants, participant groups and responses submitted, each with a link through to the relevant area.

Participant journey is the progress panel covered in detail below.

Site message boards appear if your study uses sites and you have access to any of their boards, along with unread message counts.

Recent participants lists the ten participants who most recently opened the study, with when they were last seen.

Insights is an experimental panel that appears at the top of the page for studies where it has been enabled, summarising notable patterns in your data. Data types flagged as PII or restricted are never included in what the model sees. The text of messages participants have sent in the last 30 days is included, so the model can spot common themes, with participants identified by study ID only.

A note on the participant count. "Registered participants" in Key information counts every participant record in the study, including archived and unallocated ones. The Participant journey panel described below uses a narrower group, so the two figures will not always match.

The Participant journey panel

This panel gives you a regularly refreshed summary of how your participants are progressing through their stages, and how much contact they are having with your study team.

It is calculated three times a day rather than at the moment you load the page, so the Updated timestamp in the corner tells you exactly how current the figures are. If you have just made a change — allocated a group of participants, or enabled a new stage — expect it to be reflected at the next refresh rather than immediately.

Who is included

The figures cover the participants who are still active in the study: allocated, not archived, and not withdrawn. That is the same group the participants table shows you by default, so a count here always has rows behind it — the behind-schedule figure in particular can be opened as a list of people you can chase.

Participants you have archived or withdrawn drop out of every figure in the panel from the next refresh onwards, so completion percentages describe the people still taking part rather than everyone ever enrolled. If you need the wider picture, "Registered participants" in Key information counts every record in the study.

The three views

The same set of measures is available trial-wide, broken down by participant group, or broken down by site.

Groups and sites only appear in the dropdowns once at least one participant is assigned to them. A participant who belongs to more than one group is counted in each of them.

Progress

Completed, Started and ≥25 / 50 / 75% show how far through their stages participants have got. "Started" means the participant has submitted at least one stage; "Completed" means they have submitted everything currently expected of them.

Behind schedule

The number of participants who have at least one stage past its due point.

This counts participants, not stages — someone who is late on three stages is counted once. See How "behind schedule" is decided below for exactly when a stage starts counting.

To hear about it as it happens, tick Email me when a participant falls behind schedule under Settings > Participation > Email updates (you need to be able to manage the trial). You get one email when a participant falls behind, naming the stages they are overdue on and saying how many participants in the trial are behind schedule in total. You are not emailed again while they stay behind, only if they catch up and later fall behind once more. Participants who fall behind at the same time are listed in a single email. The email ends with a link that opens the participants table showing everyone who is behind schedule, as does the behind-schedule count under Needs attention on your home page. That home page count is worked out as you load the page rather than coming from this panel's snapshot, so it always matches the number of participants the table then shows you.

Site staff, or anyone who only wants to hear about particular sites, can get the same alert per site instead. Open the site from Sites and tick A participant at this site falls behind schedule on its Notifications tab. Each email lists only the newly-behind participants at the sites you subscribe to. It's open to anyone who can see that site's participants, not only trial managers. If you also have the trial-wide alert, you won't be emailed twice.

Stalled

Participants who have started but not finished, and whose most recent submission was more than 14 days ago. This threshold is fixed at 14 days.

Participants who have never submitted anything are not counted as stalled. They appear in the "not started" figure instead.

Durations

Two views of elapsed time, shown as a median with the range and the number of participants the figure is based on.

First → latest response measures the span between a participant's first and most recent submission. It only includes participants with at least two submissions, which is why the number of participants behind it is often lower than your total.

Enrollment → latest response measures from the point the participant record was created. Note that this may be earlier than when the participant first logged in, so on studies with a long gap between creating participants and onboarding them, this figure includes that waiting time.

Fully completed participants

The same two duration measures, restricted to participants who have finished everything. This is usually the most useful picture of what a complete journey actually looks like in practice, rather than an average across people who are still mid-study.

Predicted end if cohort enrolled today

Takes how long your completers actually took from enrollment to their final submission, and projects that forward from today.

It is based purely on participants who have already finished. Early in a study, when only your fastest participants have completed, it will tend to be optimistic. It becomes more reliable as a broader mix of participants finish.

Messages

Message volume between participants and the study team over the last day, week and month, scoped to whichever view you are looking at.

These are running windows rather than separate buckets, so the 7-day figure includes the last day, and the 30-day figure includes both.

Anything sent from the study team's side counts as outbound, including bulk sends and scheduled automatic messages. That side of the count can therefore look much higher than the volume of individual conversations your team is actually having.

Which stages count towards progress

Progress is measured against what the participant can actually see and act on, not against every stage configured in the study. Specifically:

  • Stages that are switched off, and are not set to unlock after another stage or an anchor date, are not counted at all.
  • Stages scoped to particular sites or groups only count for participants at those sites or in those groups.
  • Repeating stages and anchored stages count as one item per occurrence, not one item per stage.
  • Ad-hoc stages are excluded entirely, since they are available on demand rather than scheduled.
  • Stages that have passed their availability window are removed from the calculation, as the participant can no longer complete them.

The last point has a consequence worth being aware of: when an availability window lapses, the stage stops counting against the participant, so the completion percentage goes slightly up rather than down.

Counting forms staff complete

If your team fills in some or all of the forms, as in an eCRF or a registry, the default leaves those stages out. A study run entirely through coordinator entry would show every participant at 0%. Under Settings > Participation > Staff-completed stages, tick Also include staff-only stages when measuring participant progress to include stages set to Not available to participants. The other rules above still apply. With it ticked:

  • The daily and weekly trial update emails report progress across every participant who isn't withdrawn or archived, not only those who have logged in to the app, since in a staff-run study many never will.
  • Each participant's Timeline tab lists the staff-only stages too, with their due dates.

Due soon

Alongside behind schedule, each participant has a list of what is due soon: stages that will fall behind within the next 7 days but haven't yet. It follows exactly the same rules as behind schedule (below): the same stages count, with the same exemptions, and only for participants who can be flagged at all. So "due soon" always means "about to be behind". A stage that hasn't opened yet counts too, such as a follow-up opening next week.

It shows in three places:

  • Home page: a count under Needs attention, linking to the participants table filtered to Due soon.
  • Participants table: the Due soon schedule filter, and a blue Due soon badge on each participant.
  • Site page: each site's Follow-ups tab lists its overdue and due-soon participants together, as a work list.

The list is recalculated whenever a participant's data changes and in the hourly behind-schedule check.

To have it emailed, ask for a follow-up list: every morning, or every Monday morning, at 7am UK time. It lists who is behind schedule or due soon, what for and by when, and isn't sent when there is nothing to follow up. Trial managers can get it for the whole trial under Settings > Participation > Email updates; anyone who can see a site's participants can get it for that site from the site's Notifications tab.

How "behind schedule" is decided

A stage counts as behind once its due point has passed — either the specific cutoff time configured for that stage, or midnight at the end of the day it was due if no cutoff time is set.

Never counted as behind:

  • Stages you have marked as exempt from behind-schedule status.
  • Ad-hoc stages.
  • Stages past their availability window, which the participant can no longer complete.

There is also one condition that applies to the participant rather than the stage: a participant is only ever flagged as behind schedule if they have submitted something themselves at some point. Data entered on a participant's behalf by a member of the study team does not count for this purpose.

This is deliberate: it avoids chasing participants for data that is already being collected another way. By default it also means a study run entirely through coordinator entry shows nobody as behind schedule.

For a study like that, tick Also include overdue staff-only stages in "behind schedule" checks under Settings > Participation > Staff-completed stages. With it ticked:

  • Stages that are not available to participants can fall behind too, such as an anchor-scheduled 6-month follow-up form.
  • The "submitted something themselves" condition is replaced by any data at all having been entered for the participant, by anyone. This applies to every stage, not only staff-only ones. In a study with both kinds, a participant whose only data so far was entered by staff can be flagged on an overdue app stage too: once there is data, they are on the study. A participant registered ahead of their first visit, with nothing recorded yet, is never flagged.
  • Exemptions, cutoff times and availability windows work as above. A staff-only stage with no schedule (no anchor and no Make available after…) has no due date, so it never falls behind.

In short

The panel shows a snapshot, refreshed three times a day, of progress against the scheduled stages your participants can currently see (or, with staff-completed forms counted, the stages your team completes too), across allocated participants who have not withdrawn or been archived. The Updated timestamp says how current it is: overnight, the gap between refreshes is longer than during the day.