IDEAL user guide

IDEAL is a patient identity management tool, which links the patient identifying information in the hospital data warehouse to their pseudonym in the study or cohort. Therefore, IDEAL enables data sharing for research, while protecting patient identifying information.

Read more about the IDEAL project here.

This documentation aims to provide information about the different IDEAL functionalities and equally provide a step-by-step guidance for a new user.

IDEAL has different users, who have different permissions, and consequently have different IDEAL interfaces. Check out the IDEAL Users - types and permissions and Overview of the IDEAL interface section for further information about user permissions and interfaces.

Warning

Only authorized users will be able to access the IDEAL functionalities.

Note

This project is under active development.

IDEAL interface - an overview

This section provides an overview of the IDEAL interface, so it is easier to understand how IDEAL is organized.

IDEAL users

This section provides information about the different types of users and respective permissions.

Study management: create, approve, edit and delete a study

This section explains how to create a study, approve, edit and delete a study:

Import study patients - bulk import from a CSV file

This section explains how to bulk import patients to a new study. Before the bulk import, it is important to properly define the data format of a study, so IDEAL “understands” what is being imported.

The bulk import would be the strategy to onboard an ongoing study to IDEAL, whose patient list has been maintained on Excel (for example).

IDEAL linkage

This area explains how to inspect the linkage after a bulk import of study patients and how to manually link patients from a study to the hospital.

Patient management: add a patient to a study

This section explains how to add a patient from the hospital database to a study.

This can be used to manually built a patient list for a new study created on IDEAL from scratch or add new patients to an ongoing study which was imported to IDEAL.

Editing patient information and audit log

This area gives information about the audit log, which tracks any updated on the patient information.

File export (the “key” export)

This area explains how to export files based on the patient study list and/or linakge to the hospital list.

Appointments: create schedules and patient appointments

This area explains how to create appointment schedules and how to create series or single appointments.

Calendar to view scheduled and definitive appointments

This area explains how to visualize the scheduled and definitive/booked appointments in a calendar. It also shows how to book an actual appointment via the calendar and how to export this calendar into your own calendar calendar (ex: Micorsoft Outlook)

Worflow: onboard an ongoing study to IDEAL

This section explains how to onboard a ongoing study to IDEAL: from creating a new study, to bulk import of an existing patient list and how to add new patients to this study.

Worflow: create a new study from scratch by directly adding patients from the hospital database

This section explains how to create, modify and add patients to a new study.

This would be the situation for newly-started study, in which patients are added directly from the hospital database.

IDEAL troubleshooting

This area give some tips about trousbleshooting.

IDEAL: current known issues and new features

This is a list of current known issues we are resolving and the current new features we are working on.