Helpful Action Tags for Surveys

Testing Your Survey/Form

It's critical to test your form as a survey and the survey settings you enabled. Test each survey/form distinct from testing other survey features, such as the Queue or sending invitations. The steps for testing your form as a survey are as follows:

1. Add a new record.
2. Navigate to the survey/form you want to test.
3. Open the form and click Save and Stay.
4. From the Survey Options drop-down at the top right of the form, select the Open Survey option.

Save & Return Option to Allow Respondents to Return without Needing a Return Code

When the Option is Not Allowed

• Builders cannot enable the option to allow participants to return without a code on a survey contains any PHI because it would be a HIPAA violation.
• REDCap treats data collected in notes fields as PHI. So a survey capturing a response in a note field cannot enable the option to allow participants to return without a code.

Risk Considerations for Enabling the Option

For for surveys that don't contain PHI and are not capturing a response in a notes field, the main considerations for whether or not to enable the option to save and return without a code involve the sensitivity of the data that'd being collected and ramifications for the participant, and reliability of the data that's being collected and the ramifications for the study team.

If the participant is responding to the survey on a shared device, and saves a partial response, anyone else who has access to the device may be able to access the survey link and 1) view the responses the participant already entered, and/or 2) impersonate the participant and edit and complete the survey and there would be no way for REDCap to detect this and alert the study team.

Sending Email Invitations

• OHSU policy states that OHSU business must be conducted via OHSU email.
• All emails sent through REDCap originate from OHSU email servers.
  • Email addresses must match the domain of the server they originate from, otherwise there is a high risk that participants' email clients will reject or filter the message to spam. This means sending survey invitations from a VA address or the address of an external collaborator will likely result in the invitation being rejected by the participant email provider.

Using a Shared Email for Sending Survey Invitations or Receiving Survey Notifications

Using a shared generic email address for survey related communications is a best practice. To set up your project to send invitations from a shared account and/or receive notifications at a shared account, a user assigned to your project, and who has access to the shared account, will need to add the address of the shared account as a secondary or tertiary email address to their REDCap profile, following the steps outlined below:

1. Log into REDCap
2. Go to the My Projects tab or Home tab
3. Click on Profile link in the right corner of the top nav bar.
4. Under Additional Options, add the email address of the shared account as a secondary or tertiary email.
5. REDCap sends a Verify your email address email message to the new account.
6. Log into the shared email account and click on the link in the email to log into REDCap with your username and access to confirm you want to associate the new email account with your profile.

Once the user has completed the steps described above, the shared email address will be available to select from sender drop-down component of various the tools you can use to send survey invitations, in addition to being available to select as a recipient for receiving a Survey Notification.