Why can’t I delete pending visits and specimens?

Problem: For a planned study, on participant registration, a list of "Pending visits” is displayed. Some may remain pending for a future date or may never occur. You might want to remove these to reduce clutter, but there isn’t a delete option.

The same is true with specimens listed under a visit: pending specimens cannot be removed even if they are irrelevant, because they come from specimen requirements configured under events.

Reason: This occurs because OpenSpecimen distinguishes between Events and Visits.

• Event (protocol level):

  • A planned time point in the Collection Protocol (e.g., Baseline, Week 1, Month 6) that defines what should happen during the study.

  • On the participant page, “Pending visits” shown are actually pending Events, not Visits.
    
    

• Visit (participant level): The actual record created when a participant completes an event. It exists only after data is entered (e.g., visit date, status: completed, pending, or not collected, etc).

Since what you see on the overview after registration are events indicating expected visits with no actual records yet, there is nothing to delete. Hence, these can’t be deleted.