Hide uncollected specimens / collapse view in “Collect Visits and Specimens”?

[Marie_Parsons]

Hi all,

I’m working with a Collection Protocol that has multiple predefined specimen requirements for an Endoscopy event (e.g. oesophagus, gastric body, duodenum, ileum, caecum, ascending colon, transverse colon, etc.). Each primary specimen also has derived specimens (organoids, aliquots, frozen tissue).

When I open the collection event within a participant record, all specimen requirements are displayed by default, including those that have not been collected. In addition, all specimens appear expanded, which makes the interface quite cluttered and difficult to navigate when only a subset are actually collected.

I’ve tried adjusting CP settings (e.g. Show Primary Specimens and Create Pending Specimens on Visit Collection), but the behaviour remains the same.

Due to limitations with our lookup lists (anatomical sites not yet configured), we’ve temporarily modelled each biopsy site as a separate specimen requirement. This works functionally but creates a usability issue in the event screen.

My question is whether there is a way to hide or filter out uncollected (pending) specimens, or have specimens collapsed by default in this view. Alternatively, are there any recommended best practices for managing usability when working with a large number of specimen requirements?

Thanks in advance!

[Lee_Ann]

Hi Marie

We have the same issue with some collections looking cluttered because they have so many specimen requirements. In settings, there is a Pending Specimens Display Interval that you can set to hide pending specimens after “x” amount of days. That helps with the clutter after the collection.

We do have a workflow where coordinators only see primary specimens when collecting specimens. But the tissue bankers still see everything and it has been a pain point for them as well.

Lee

[Rohan_Patwardhan]

Whenever similar issues are observed, the first thing to verify is whether the configured specimen requirements (SRs) align with the actual SOP/workflow. If most predefined SRs continue to remain in the ‘Pending’ status, it is usually an indication that the SRs are not configured appropriately. Thus, instead of finding workarounds, the SRs should be cleaned up.

In this case, Marie had created separate SRs for each anatomic site (10 total), along with 4 derivatives for each primary specimen. However, in practice, specimens were received from only 1–2 sites. As a result, SRs for all other sites were unnecessarily appearing in the specimen table (~50 rows).

After identifying this, we simplified the setup by configuring only 2 primary specimens and using the Nth step configuration to allow users to select the applicable anatomic site during specimen collection.

With this, the specimen table now looks clean with only the needed SRs resolving the root cause.

If anyone else is facing similar issues and needs help with simplification, please raise a support ticket or email contact@krishagni.com

[Donna_Housley]

Hi Marie,
We have a very similar issue, also with an endoscopy biobank and several others. Our endoscopy bank has 3 visits, each with about 10-15 specimen requirements with predefined anatomic sites depending on whether it is upper scope vs. lower scope or both.

I used Rohan’s approach, using an Nth step to solve this with a different biobank collecting a limited number of tissues, allowing the anatomic site to be specified at the Nth step. However, the limitation with this is the unknown number of primary samples. So if they collect more than the 2 expected tissues, the remainder need to be collected as unplanned and that requires a lot more steps at the Nth step to deal with samples without SR codes, if you are using those to define the events that need to be processed.

Something to consider as a future feature would be an option to create a planned specimen requirement, along with deriviatives and aliquots, that could be repeated indefinitely, similar to the ‘copy last’ feature for unplanned samples.