A center is the link between your users and your subjects. A user sees a subject's information only if they are connected to that subject's center, which makes centers the backbone of access control on a multicentric study.
š Prerequisite: Centers (Edit) on your platform role, to create or change a center. Centers (Access) is enough to view the list.
What counts as a center
A center can be a single practitioner, such as a local doctor's office, or a whole organization, such as a major hospital. Datacapt does not limit how many you create, so make them match how your study is actually run rather than how your organization is drawn on paper.
Once created, a center is used in several places:
EDC: linking users and subjects to their center inside a clinical study.
Site CTMS, subject database: deciding which subject records a user can see.
Site CTMS, recruitment and calendar: organizing recruitment and scheduling by site.
Create a center
š ļø Step by step guide
Go to Settings and open Centers.
Select + Add Center.
Complete the details:
Name: a descriptive name. It can be the full legal name.
Abbreviation: up to 10 capital characters. Read the warning below before choosing it.
Country: from the drop-down list.
Address, email and phone: optional.
Participant Account, Instructions: optional, and not yet active in the current version.
Select Save.
The abbreviation is the decision that matters
Everything else on the form can be edited freely later. The abbreviation cannot, because it does not stay on this page: it appears in filters, in center selection, and inside your subject ID codes.
ā ļø Warning: if you change a center's abbreviation while a clinical study is using it in the subject ID pattern, the subject study codes change too. Those codes are how your sites, your monitors and your statistician refer to individual participants, and they may already be written into source documents and correspondence.
Treat the abbreviation as permanent from the moment the first subject is included. If you genuinely have to change it, work out which studies use it first, and tell everybody before you save.
š” Tip: agree one abbreviation format across your company before you create your second center. Two country letters and a short name works well, for example US-GENHOSP for United States General Hospital. Doing this once saves you a database of inconsistent subject IDs later, and it costs nothing on day one. See Set a Subject ID Pattern for how the abbreviation is used.
Update a center
š ļø Step by step guide
Go to Settings and open Centers.
Find the center, using the filters if the list is long.
Click the center's row to open its details.
Make your changes.
Select Save.