The Recruitment module handles everything between a person hearing about your study and becoming a subject in it: the public page, their application, pre-screening, the visit they book, and what you pay them. This article defines the vocabulary and answers the questions clients ask first.
What the words mean
Recruitment study: a project for managing participant applications and scheduling visits.
Application: a submission by an individual, waiting for your review.
Application status: where that application has reached in the recruitment workflow.
Participant: an individual who could join the clinical projects the recruitment study is feeding. Once confirmed, a participant becomes a subject inside a clinical study.
Recruitment study public page: a public web page telling potential participants what the center is recruiting for. If you enable the option, they can apply from it directly.
Pre-Screening Survey: a survey you design yourself. If you activate it, a participant has to complete it before their application can be submitted, and automations can sort the answers for you.
Target number: the total number of recruitment slots available. Centers usually set this above the panel size, so a 60-participant panel might target more screening visits than that to allow for drop-out.
Schedules: pre-configured agendas for visits, for example every 30 minutes from 9 AM on a given day.
Payments: tracking for the indemnities you owe recruited and qualified participants.
đĄ Tip: participant and subject are two different objects in Datacapt, not two words for the same person. A participant lives in a recruitment study; a subject lives in a clinical study. Keeping the two words apart in your own conversations saves a lot of confusion later.
What centers can do
Create recruitment projects, including a public page for external communication.
Collect and manage online applications.
Carry applications from online submission through to in-person review, and hit your panel targets.
Automate administrative tasks that would otherwise be manual.
Work directly with the Subject Database.
What participants can do
Apply online for new studies.
Complete pre-screening surveys online.
Look up recruitment information whenever they want.
How it fits with the other modules
The Recruitment module works on its own or as part of a larger setup, depending on how your project is designed. It connects to the Payment and Agenda modules, and it sits between the Subject Database and the EDC clinical module.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need one recruitment study per product, or can I group several under one?
Do I need one recruitment study per product, or can I group several under one?
You can use a single recruitment study for one product or for a group of products. Recruitment studies are deliberately flexible on this point.
Does an application flow into the EDC module automatically, creating an eCRF with the answers already collected?
Does an application flow into the EDC module automatically, creating an eCRF with the answers already collected?
Partly, and it is worth being precise about which half.
You can bring participants across without retyping them. On an EDC study's Subjects page, the blue + offers a From recruitment tab listing participants of the linked recruitment study, and you pick the ones you want. It requires the recruitment study to be Recruiting, the EDC study to be Live, and an EDC link set in the recruitment study's settings. Only participants at Qualified or Enrolled appear.
What does not happen is the rest of it: nothing is triggered automatically, and answers already collected during pre-screening are not copied into the eCRF. See Include a subject and open their eCRF for the procedure.
Will the recruitment module actually save us time?
Will the recruitment module actually save us time?
The saving comes mostly from online applications and pre-screening surveys, which let you contact the most suitable participants first instead of working through everyone. Clients have reported saving the equivalent of 50% to 100% of a full-time employee's workload, which they put back into recruitment quality and capacity.
Can I recruit across several centers, and in several languages?
Can I recruit across several centers, and in several languages?
Yes. The module supports multicentric organizations and more than 89 languages, with no capacity limit.