Summary
The following content provides an overview of processes involved with setting up sites for participating in later phase multi-site studies in ClinSpark. This is applicable to ClinSpark users who perform administrative functions, such as establishing site and study configurations. Sites must be established first before adding them to study configurations.
Overview
The following video provides an overview of the site setup process.
Site management
Site entities represent the physical study site location where subject enrollments and data collection will take place. This same site will also be added to certain user configurations to establish site restrictions, to ensure those users can only access specific site(s) data.
Sites that are setup via Administration > Sites are global entities. They exist with the purpose/expectation of being established and maintained across one or more studies.
If a site is expected to participate in one or more studies, that site should not be created multiple times in Administration > Sites. Instead, the site would simply be added to study configurations established where that site is participating.
These are the recommendations for setting up sites:
Fill out as much of the site details as possible including address, phone, and investigator details. Once added to a study, the investigator details can be modified per study.
Always select a timezone setting that appropriately matches the physical location (closest city or region). More details on timezones are listed below.
Establish height/weight unit of measure appropriate to the site geographic location and study preferences
Ensure proper volunteer display patterns to meet site regional privacy laws
If customers have any questions about establishing site entities, they are encouraged to reach out to Foundry Health via service desk ticket.
Site timezones
The proper selection of site timezone is critical for supporting data collection workflows and certain logic built into device configurations, reports, and dashboard components that rely on the site setting.
ClinSpark offers timezone options based on what is built into the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The JVM however supports a wide selection of ‘deprecated’ timezones for compatibility reasons, but not all are appropriate for use. A majority of the selections of the JVM are built around this pattern:
Abbreviation-based identifiers (GMT, AST, UTC)
Administrative zones and GMT offsets (Etc/UTC, Etc/GMT+6)
Country/StateOrRegion (US/Pacific, Cuba)
Area/Locality (America/New_York, Europe/London)
Area/Region/Locality (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires, America/Indiana/Knox)
Whenever possible, the most accurate and appropriate selection of timezone follows the pattern of Area/Region/Locality or Area/Locality. This ensures that the most regionally accurate timezone is selected in order to properly observe timezone rules (such as daylight savings) in that physical area.
Selections of Country/StateorRegion, or, abbreviation based identifiers such as GMT offsets is typically less accurate and generally not recommended. Selection of GMT offsets do not properly observe regional requirements for daylight savings time. Additionally, certain Country/StateorRegion selections are less accurate than Area/Locality, because countries and state regions span multiple physical cities and areas that can observe different rules for daylight savings time.
It’s therefore important to search the timezone list for a selection of the proper locality for a given site, or, the locality that matches the closest city.
As an example, lets consider a site located in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico observes Atlantic Standard Time (AST). AST however spans multiple regions where only some locations observe daylight savings time. However, Puerto Rico does not observe daylight savings. While it would seem appropriate to select the AST timezone based upon what most documented sources would suggest, in practice, it is best to select America/Puerto_Rico as the timezone to ensure the correct observance of daylight savings.
Timezone Lookup
The following lookup feature can be used to search for a site physical address and/or city location and return back the correct timezone selection to be used in ClinSpark.
The most accurate results will be returned if using the site physical address or city name (example: San Juan). Otherwise, searching on a region (example: Puerto Rico) will also return results which can be used.
Other notes
On the ClinSpark development roadmap is an initiative to improve the selection of timezones for site configurations to avoid setup challenges. If customers have questions (or comments) about timezone setup they are encouraged to reach out via service desk ticket to discuss.
Timezone Lookup
The following lookup feature can be used to search for a site physical address and/or city location and return back the correct timezone selection to be used in ClinSpark.
The most accurate results will be returned if using the site physical address or city name (example: San Juan). Otherwise, searching on a region (example: Puerto Rico) will also return results which can be used.
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INSERT TIMEZONE LOOKUP
Other notes
On the ClinSpark development roadmap is an initiative to improve the selection of timezones for site configurations to avoid setup challenges. If customers have questions (or comments) about timezone setup they are encouraged to reach out via service desk ticket to discuss.