I consider myself very experienced with REDCap but there is still one issue that I haven't found a solution to yet. We are running a large clinical trial with human subjects and occasionally, they move out of town or are not available to come in for their data collections. However, they are still willing to complete the survey portion of the data collection. I would like to schedule their surveys to go out for future events but when I schedule the surveys, it stores their email address and creates a link between their identifiable information and their subject id. Is there a way to schedule emails while also concealing/hiding the email address?
Thanks!
Quite frankly, no. If REDCap sends survey invitations then you cannot consider the project anonymous. But you can (and always should) tighten up access to the contact information to the extent that no users can see both their personally identifiable information and their response data or medical/health data.
Ensure the email field is marked as an identifier, and put it on a form with other identifying information (or, with information that is not needed for data analysis), such as a 'contact information' instrument.
Next, use the User Rights options to ensure that no single project user can access both the record's contact information and their response data/PHI, and ensure that users who should not see contact information are limited to de-identified data exports.
You could configure the ASIs or alerts yourself, and trigger alerts with invitations to future surveys based on the answer to a field 'send me electronic invitations to surveys' or something like that, and if checked, branch an email question, letting them know the email is used for contact only and is not used to link them to their information. You must also tell REDCap which email field it should associate with the participant for the purposes of sending alerts/ASIs (even if there's only one email field, it won't assume this).