Alerts & Notifications

Initial Considerations

REDCap's Alerts and Notifications feature allows you to create and send customized email notifications to one or more recipients (eg. your study staff, participants, or other collaborators). While similar to the Automated Survey Invitation (ASI) feature already in REDCap this feature allows for greater complexity and has more capabilities.

• ASI allows a single alert to be sent to the survey recipient, 

• Alerts and Notifications allows for an unlimited number of alerts that can be used on both survey and data entry forms to send to any desired user, email, or participant

Testing the Alerts & Notifications for your project is your responsibility. Please be sure to test thoroughly! The REDCap team simply cannot account for every scenario to which an application may be applied.

Note: This feature will only be available to users that have "Project Design and Setup" rights for a project. If you have the proper rights, "Alerts and Notifications" is the first link located under "Applications" on the left-hand navigation menu.

The Process

Select the "Alerts and Notifications" from the left Nav column

Open

Set the Alert

1. Click "Add New Alert". A pop up will appear with steps for adding a new alert.
   
   

   Open

   

   
   There are 6 sections on the following page:
   • Title of this alert
   • Step 1: Triggering the Alert
   • Step 2: Set the Alert Schedule
   • Step 3: Message Settings
   • Message Attachments
   • Optional Automatic Alert Expiration
   
   
   

2. Type Alert title and choose what will trigger the alert. You can have it triggered by form/survey save, conditional logic, or both.
   
   

3. If you select when a record is saved on a specific form/survey you will be able to select the form/survey from a dropdown that is populated from your project.

4. If you select conditional logic a box will appear for you to input the logic statement.

   1. There is not an easy builder option like with branching logic or the report builder so you will be required to know some logic basics.  It is a good practice open a separate window and have the codebook up to reference variable names and coding schemes
      
      

5. Set when the alert should be sent and how frequently you want the alert to be sent:
   
   

   1. Send immediately,

   2. Send after a set amount of time

   3. Send at specific date and time.

   4. You will also be able to choose if you would like the alert to be sent once or to repeat the alert.
      

6. Specify the recipient, sender, message text, and other settings for the notification. For the message, you may utilize customized options such as rich text, the piping of field variables (including Smart Variables), and uploading multiple file attachments.

   1. The message body does allow for piping and the use of smart variables.

   2. Add attachments if desired.
      
      
      

1. Alert Expiration is an optional field

   1. If you are using alerts that repeat indefinitely, the Alert Expiration will stop the notifications after a specified date (e.g., end of study).

   2. Alert Expiration will globally stop all alerts
      

      
      
      
      

2. Once you select "Save", your alert will immediately become active and may be triggered at any time thereafter.
   
   
   

Edit or Deactivate an Alert

1. In the Alert box there are options to edit the alert, copy the alert and deactivate the alert

2. Select "options" for the specific alert

3. Click deactivate alert from the drop-down
   

   
   
   
   

1. Re-evaluate some or all Alerts & Notifications for all records in a project. 

   1. If an alert has been modified after data has already been entered in the project, click the "Re-evaluate Alerts" button on the Alerts & Notifications page,

      1. This will re-evaluate selected alerts for all records to ensure that notifications get properly sent or scheduled based on the new conditions of the alert

         • Previously this could only be triggered if each individual record had data modified.

         • If a user modifies the conditional logic of an alert, it will recommend that they utilize the "Re-evaluate Alerts" functionality.

         • If an alert has the "Ensure logic is still true…" option checked, then it is possible during this process that some already-scheduled notifications might get removed (and thus would no longer be scheduled) based on the new conditions.
           
           
           

Notification Log

1. To view the alert activity, click on the "Notification Log" tab or click on "view list" in the Activity box:
   
   
   

Additional Considerations

• Longitudinal Project Alerts

You can choose the Event and/or Arm associated with the instrument/survey to trigger when the alert is sent: Example: [event_1_arm_1][field]

• Logging
  
  

  1. In the left menu, on REDCap, there is the Logging option. This option allows the user to check information related to sent alerts.