Daylight Savings Time

Summary

Before running a study during daylight savings time, it’s important to configure the study to account for the desired behavior for timed activities.

When activating cohort assignments, you may encounter a scenario where the reference and the scheduled activity to be activated will span different parts of the year as it relates to Daylight Savings Time (DST).  ClinSpark facilitates handling of these time changes on a per-study basis.

The Study > Configure module contains a setting titled Maintain Timing Offsets with DST?

• Selecting ‘Yes’ will maintain activity timing relative to dosing (i.e. a 24 hour PK draw will still occur 24 hours after dosing, though the time of day will shift).

• Selecting ‘No’ will maintain time of day instead (i.e. a 24 hour PK draw will still occur at the originally-scheduled time of day, though the timing relative to dosing will shift).

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A Note About Site Timezones

ClinSpark allows customers to setup site entities (via Administration > Sites) with a timezone setting. The selection of timezone will impact certain features that take into account daylight savings time.

Sites should be set up to use the appropriate time zone region and not the time zone offset to properly accommodate for DST.

For example - US/Central time is GMT-6 during standard time and GMT-5 during daylight time. However if customers want ClinSpark to automatically account for daylight savings (which we recommend), you’ll want to be sure the site timezone setting uses the US/Central time zone rather than a GMT time zone.

If customers have any questions about this, they are encouraged to reach out to us via service desk.

Example of Maintaining Offset

When creating a new study or editing a study in Administration > Studies, set the Maintain Timing Offsets with DST study setting to Yes.

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When creating an activity in CRF Design > Activity Plans, configure the offset according to the time shift.  In this example a 6 hours post reference.

When viewing the activity plan, note the timezone portion in the example time: CST and CDT. The example time moved an hour ahead for our 6 hour post reference activity automatically adjusting for CDT.

Example of Not Maintaining Offset

When creating a new study or editing a study in Administration > Studies, set the Maintain Timing Offsets with DST study setting to No.

When creating an activity in CRF Design > Activity Plans, configure the offset according to the time shift.  In this example a 6 hours post reference.

When viewing the activity plan, note the timezone portion in the example time: CST and CDT. The example time did not move an hour ahead for our 6 hour post reference activity automatically adjusting for CDT.