How to: Collect Medications and Tie them to the Participant Profile Card – Ripple Science

Teams can use Ripple surveys to collect a respondent’s medications. The medication questions can connect to global custom variables so that teams can search for, and filter, these medications in the Registry. This can help teams who have study eligibility restrictions based on medications.

How to Collect medications onto the Participant Profile Card:

Step 1: Create your Global Custom Variables

Navigate to the Study Settings (red)
Go to Requirements (green)
Scroll down to the Custom Variables section and click “Create a New Custom Variable”
Change the Input Type to “Short Text” (red)
Name your Medication Name variable (green)
Click “Save” (purple)
Click the Global checkbox to make the variable global
Click the “Create a New Custom Variable” button
Change the Input Type to “Short Text” (red)
Name your Medication Dosage variable (green)
Click “Save” (purple)
Click the Global checkbox to make the variable global
Repeat Steps 3-12 to create more global variables depending on how many medications you want to capture in your survey

Tip

Create a Long Text type variable to collect extra medications beyond your first few.

Step 2: Add Medication Questions to your Survey

Navigate to the Study Settings (red)
Go to the Survey Creator (green)
Click the “Add New Survey” button (purple) and name your survey
Go to the Toolbox and select a Radiogroup question (red)
Give the question a Name (red) that describes what the question is about. This name should be short and descriptive. This name is what identifies the question on the survey logic page and is used in the survey export.
Add a Title (green). The title is the information that the respondent sees on the survey. Fill in a question that asks respondents how many medications they’re taking (green).
Scroll down to the “Choices” section
In the Value column, add the options for the number of medications a respondent can select from
Use the Toolbox to add a Single Input question for the first medication’s name (red)
Link the question to Med 1 Name Survey variable (green)
Use the Toolbox to add a Single Input question for the first medication’s dosage (red)
Link the question to Med 1 Dosage Survey variable (green)
Use the Toolbox to add a Panel (red)
Name your panel (green) 1 Med Panel.
Drag your Med 1 Name and Med 1 Dosage questions into the Panel

Step 3: Create more panels to collect more medication data if the respondent is on 2 or more medications

Create another panel (red) from the Toolbox and name it 2 Med Panel (green)
Recreate the Single Input questions for Medication 1 Name and Medication 1 Dosage questions using the steps outlined above
Link the recreated Medication 1 Name and Medication 1 Dosage questions to the Med 1 Name and Med 1 Dosage survey variables
Drag the questions into your 2 Med Panel
Create Medication 2 Name and Medication 2 Dosage questions using the steps outlined above (red)
Link the Medication 2 Name and Medication 2 Dosage questions to the Med 2 Name and Med 2 Dosage survey variables
Drag the questions into your 2 Med Panel
Repeat this process to create the 3 Med Panel and More than 3 Meds Panel. For each additional panel, make sure you include the earlier medications as well as the new medication questions.

Step 4: Set up your survey logic

Go to the “Survey Logic” tab
Click the “Add New” button
In “Define condition(s)” choose, “number of meds” in the left dropdown (red)
In “Define condition(s)” choose, “1” in the right dropdown (green)
In “Define action(s)”, select “Panel visibility” from the “Select an action to add…” dropdown (red)
In the second dropdown, select your panel that contains only medication number 1 (green)
Save and return the logic statement.
Repeat these steps for as many medications and corresponding panels as you created.
Go back to the Survey Designer (red) and click “Save Survey” (green)
Go to the “Test Survey” tab to test your survey