Filtering With Participant Segments

Segments help you organize your project's participants into meaningful groups, such as “Participants with Baseline Survey incomplete” or “Participants within 1 week of surgery.” Once you have created segments, you can use them to:

• View information for a selected segment at a glance in the participant viewer.
• Schedule surveys for different segments.
• Deliver notifications to certain segments.
• Perform bulk actions on a group of participants at once. 

Creating a Segment

To create a participant segment:

1. Open your project and go to the "Participants" tab.
2. Select the segment drop-down menu.
   
3. Select "Add Segment."
4. Enter a name for your segment and select the filter criteria.
   
5. Select "Save."

To customize which columns will appear for a segment every time it is loaded, select the "Configure Columns" check box, then select which columns you want to appear before clicking Save.

When setting filter criteria, you can select various options depending on the type of data. For text data you might select "contains" or "starts with." For numerical data you might select "equals" or "greater than or equal to." For more information on the filter criteria available, see Filter Criteria Types.

Using Advanced Filter Logic

Advanced filter logic allows you to set up more complicated filter criteria for your segments.

Select the "NOT" button next to any filter criteria to make it into the opposite condition. For example, if the filter criteria is "Gender equals Male" then adding NOT to it will make it select everyone whose gender is not male.

Select the "OR" button to add another criteria where either can be true.

Select the "AND" button to add another criteria where all must be true. The example below will select men who are age 65 and older.

Configuring Columns

In addition to setting your advanced filter logic for a segment, you can also configure which columns display by checking the "Configure Columns" checkbox when editing your segment.

When configuring your segment's columns, you can choose between different participant fields and coordinator surveys to display. If you add any coordinator surveys as columns, you can quickly launch the survey right from your segment view.

Copying a Segment

Sometimes, you may want to create multiple segments with similar filter logic. Instead of starting from scratch for every segment, you can copy an existing segment and add or remove filter logic as needed. To copy a segment, click the copy icon next to the segment you wish to duplicate.

A new Segment editor will open with the same filter logic as the original segment.

Duplicate segment names are not permitted, so you will be required to populate the Segment Name field with a unique name before being able to save.

You may choose to copy the segment to the project you are currently working in or to a different project within your organization. For example, you may have a Dry Run project that you use for building and testing before pushing to a Production project. Instead of creating new segments from scratch, you can now copy segments directly from your Dry Run project to your Production project (refer to Testing Your Project for more on Dry Run and Production projects). 

To copy segments from project to project, users must have "Project Builder" and "View/Manage Participants in All Segments" permissions. Update organization permissions by selecting Settings at the top of the page and then clicking Teams from the list of organization settings.

Selecting a Segment

In the participant viewer, use the segment drop-down selector to choose which segment to view. You can also choose the default segment for "All Participants." The currently-selected segment is highlighted.

Using Segment Actions

There may be instances where you want to send a survey or notification to a specific segment. For example, you may want to send an enrollment reminder to participants who have not yet enrolled.

You can perform actions on any segment except "All Participants." The following actions are available:

• Send a survey to all participants in the segment.
• Deliver a notification to all participants in the segment.
• Close a survey for all participants in the segment.
• Set a custom field for all participants in the segment.

The example below will send an enrollment reminder to participants' default email address - this can be found under the demographic information for the participant.

There may be instances where you need to send an email notification to additional email addresses, or an SMS notification to additional phone numbers. To accomplish this, first you need to create custom fields with a data type of phone or email. Once the custom fields are defined, you can select them from the dropdown menu next to "Use Custom Field."

Editing or Deleting a Segment

To edit a segment's name or filter criteria, select the edit icon from the segment drop-down.

When opening the segment editor, you will also notice a copyable Segment ID in the upper right corner. This can be helpful for querying using the REST API. 

To delete a segment, select the red trash icon.

You cannot edit or delete the "All Participants" segment.

Segment Categories

To set up segment categories for your project, you can create a segment, select "Create New Category", and enter your segment category name. 

Once you have created a new segment category, you can then select the segment category for future segments. 

After creating and selecting your segment categories, you will be able to view your segments based on their assigned segment category within the "Participants" tab.