Creating your first study

This will guide you through creating your first study using recruIT.

recruIT uses the OHDSI Atlas tool to create cohorts that define the eligibility criteria for a clinical trial.

Start by opening Atlas and clicking on Define a New Cohort:

Now, give the cohort a name ("Test") and description ("Test cohort for recruIT"). Using the Cohort Entry Events and Inclusion Criteria sections, you can define the criteria a patient must fulfill in order to be included in the study. See this chapter in the book of OHDSI for more information on defining cohorts.

Save the cohort by clicking the top-right green Save button.

For testing purposes, you can already generate the cohort by clicking on the Generation tab and clicking the ▶️ Generate button for the desired CDM source.

You can use the Samples tab to view a sample of patients within that cohort and take a look at their health data to help with tuning your criteria:

If you are happy with your cohort, you can indicate to the query module that this cohort should be regularly re-generated and should appear in the screening list UI. To do so, you have to add a special text to either the description or the title of the cohort. By default and for historical reason, that label is [UC1]. This label is configurable on the query module using either the QUERY_SELECTOR_MATCHLABELS environment variable (when deploying via Docker Compose) or the query.cohortSelectorLabels value (when deploying via Helm).

Add this label to either the title or the description and save the cohort again:

After some time (depending on the module's QUERY_SCHEDULE_UNIXCRON/query.schedule setting) the query module should detect this cohort definition, generate the cohort, and transfer all candidate patients to the FHIR server. At this point, the study should appear in the screening list overview:

Clicking on it reveals the list of 8 candidate patients:

Depending on your setup, the notification module may also have notified you of the updated screening list entries via email:

Congratulations, you've just created your first cohort definition, displayed potentially eligible patients in the screening list, and received a notification email about them!