Introduction
Once all the configuration and mapping of the fields are completed, you can synchronize data from the REDCap server. The synchronization can be conducted manually at the CP level and automatically at System Level.
CP Level Synchronization
The manual synchronization can be performed in two steps:
Synchronization of Instruments
Navigate to CP Overview Page and click on the ‘setting’ tab on the sidebar.
Under the project tab, click on the ‘More’ button and select ‘Synchronize Instruments’.
Synchronization of records
Similarly to synchronize the records, click on the ‘More' button under the project tab and select ‘Synchronize Records’.
You will get three options to synchronize the records:
Incremental Updates
It will update the latest changes in the records from the last synchronization run.
All Records
It will pull all the records of the project from the REDCap server.
Selected Records
It will pull user-specified records as shown below in the red box.
Participant Merging
Participant identifiers such as MRN, eMPI, SSN are used to merge the incoming REDCap participant records. A simple illustration shown with MRN is below:
REDCap | OpenSpecimen | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
New record | The MRN of the incoming record matched the MRN of the participant registered to a different protocol. | The existing participant record should get reused during registration. |
New record |
| The incoming participant record should be linked to the existing registration. |
New record |
| Error: The participant is already registered. |
| Incoming MRN refers to another participant of another protocol. | Error |
| Incoming MRN refers to another participant of the same protocol. | Error |
| Incoming MRN is not available. | Update the MRN for the linked participant. |
Synchronization Status
OpenSpecimen provides an audit log for the synchronization run.
To check the synchronization status, change to the 'Synchronization Runs' tab and click on the 'Refresh' button, as shown in the image below.
If any error is encountered during the synchronization, it will be displayed as 'Failed', and the user can download the error file for reference as shown below in the red box.
If there are no errors during the synchronization, it will be displayed as 'Success' as shown below in the green box.
The ‘Records' column shown below displays the information on the number of records that synchronized without errors (left side) and the number of records that faced errors (right side).
Abort synchronization run
Whenever the synchronization starts accidentally, or the server shut down, the user can use the abort feature to stop the synchronization in the middle of the run.
To abort the synchronization run, click on the abort icon shown in the red box below.
A pop-up message asking for confirmation will appear.
Click on 'Yes' to confirm. It will update the status in the audit log to 'Aborted'.
System Level (Auto) Synchronization
It is a very tedious task to manually go to the configuration page and perform synchronization every time you update the data in REDCap. Therefore to handle such a problem, OpenSpecimen provides system-level auto-synchronization. It is achieved via the Jobs module as follows:
Go to the "Jobs "from the homepage and click on the '+create' button.
Add details about Job Name, Type, Implementation, Runtime parameters as shown below for Instrument and records synchronization.
Depending on the institutional need, you can specify the time intervals between two synchronization runs.
System-level Auto Synchronization is an incremental synchronization as discussed above.
Instrument synchronizer
Records synchronizer
