Taming the Data Entry Parrot: Polly Wants a Repeating Study Form

Just like a parrot, sometimes study forms repeat.

A participant may have multiple tumors, medications, adverse events, or seizure types. Or several assessments may be completed during the same study event. The challenge isn't getting the form to repeat. That's the easy part. The challenge is deciding what should repeat, what shouldn't, and what each new instance needs to know about everything that came before it.

There is an important distinction here. Some forms repeat because the study schedule repeats. A vitals form might appear at Baseline, Week 2, Week 4, and Week 8. The schedule tells us when another form should appear and which timepoint it belongs to.

Other forms repeat because the thing we're collecting information about can itself occur more than once. A participant can have several tumors, medications, adverse events, or seizure types. Some may exist only within a single study event. Others may persist across many.

That's when a simple + New button starts hiding a lot of decisions. Is this actually new, or is it something already entered? What makes one instance different from another? What information should carry forward the next time we see it? Can two instances overlap? Does the instance belong to a particular study event or persist across visits? And what happens if we get one of those decisions wrong?

This three-part series looks at those questions from the perspective of the person entering the data. Part 1, Data Entry Déjà Vu: The Trouble With Repeating Study Forms, starts with the deceptively difficult question of whether something is actually new. Part 2 looks at what happens to the data when we encounter the same instance again, including previous values, carry-forward, and reconciliation. Part 3 looks at dates and relationships, including how showing what has already happened can help someone enter what happens next.