20240917 - REDCap Ticket System Required for ALL REDCap Requests
- Christopher Sorensen
Beginning Tuesday, September 17, 2024, ANY and ALL REDCap support requests, requests for consultations, questions related to REDCap, or other must be submitted to the WashU REDCap Ticketing System. If you email the REDCap Helpdesk email, email me (Chris Sorensen), ping me on Teams, or contact anyone on the REDCap support team with questions, you will be redirected to the Submit a REDCap Ticket page. If you would like to request a consultation, please submit a ticket with the description of what you would like to discuss at the meeting plus times you are available to meet. Tickets do not need to be submitted for move to production requests, production modification requests, API token requests, external module requests or other requests that have a specific button with the REDCap application to request the service. For a better understanding of the support we provide, please see the following links:
Please know that there is never a charge or fee for submitting a ticket. Based on the nature of the request, we may refer you to our fee for service options or to Biostatistics.
The ticketing system has been simplified from its beta and version 1.0 by removing questions and making it a single page. If you follow the instructions on the Submit a REDCap Ticket page and click the “Contact the REDCap Administrator” button, much of the information will be completed for you.
We currently have a lopsided REDCap support FTE to REDCap support demand. For example, the REDCap Consortium defines active users as any user who has used REDCap in the previous six months. Active projects are defined as projects with activity in the past six months. We also can see how many people log in to WashU REDCap each day and concurrently (i.e., how many users are logged in at the same time per day). Here are our current ratios of REDCap support FTE ratio to the statistics:
1 REDCap support FTE per ~1900 active REDCap users
1 REDCap support FTE per ~2500 active REDCap projects
1 REDCap support FTE per ~400 REDCap users logged in daily
1 REDCap support FTE per ~200 REDCap users logged in concurrently at peak usage time
Given many of our users and projects go back and forth between active and not active, if we go back 2 years and look at how many users and projects our ratios are:
1 REDCap support FTE per ~5000 REDCap users
1 REDCap support FTE per ~5100 REDCap projects
And we do get requests from people who are not active REDCap users about projects that are not considered active (i.e., no activity in the past 6 months).
Before I go any further, I’d like to acknowledge that WashU REDCap users, A.K.A. thousands of members of the WashU research community, are the hardest working and most dedicated people I have ever had the pleasure of working with and working for. Working with WashU REDCap users is at the top of my “why I enjoy my job list.” So, providing these statistics is by no means meant to say that we are busier than any REDCap users or that you should not submit support requests. I am only trying to provide you a realistic perspective on the demand for REDCap support.
These numbers do not take into account how many support requests we get over a period of time, so it is difficult to report that to our funders. It’s also not practical for us to analyze these numbers in a shared email inbox as it gets very messy and hard to distinguish between multiple requests, how long it took to complete the request, and if the request was completed at all. Consider the FTE daily user log in ratio. We actually have a total of ~800 users who log in each weekday. If one half of one percent of those users submit a ticket, (approximately four tickets) that require testing or looking through documentation for 1-2 hours, that takes the majority of 1 FTEs workday. In general, we have more than four of these requests per day in addition to simpler requests (i.e., remove an instrument from an event in a production project) which is why we usually have a back log. Note, that tickets do not include move to production requests, production modification requests, API token requests, or other requests that do not involve submitting to the ticket system.
In addition to submitting a ticket for support, I also have created hundreds of pages of WashU REDCap Self-Service Support where you can find answers yourself, and a WUSTL REDCap User Community where you can ask questions to your fellow REDCap users. Please note, that I will no longer be providing answers directly in the user community. I may review posts, recommend you submit a ticket, and circle back to post a solution in the community group. I will only post my potential solutions, however, after they have been deemed acceptable by the user who made the original post. The reason I will not post until the answer is approved is because if I post “brainstorm” ideas as they come to mind as an option and it turns out not acceptable, I do not want other community members to see that post.
Based on these numbers, please take the time to submit your requests to the ticket system. We must have all support documented in a way that it can be analyzed in order to report our effort to our funders. This will help us improve our REDCap support FTE to REDCap support demand and help ensure our users receive quality, efficient REDCap support.
Thank you for your understanding!
Chris Sorensen
Christopher J. Sorensen, PhD, MSCI, MS
Medical Informaticist II
WashU REDCap Administrator
Institute for Informatics, Biostatistics & Data Science
Washington University School of Medicine
Pronouns: He/Him/His (What is this?)
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