Mosio is a messaging service specifically tailored for REDCap users, allowing for automated survey invites, alerts, and survey invitations via SMS/text messaging. Mosio is available for project teams through a monthly subscription model. For more information about the subscription plans and how to get an account, please read Getting a Mosio Account.
For those with a basic plan or higher, you will have the ability to design "Storylines", which will allow you to enroll a participant in a series of schedule SMS alerts and surveys. This article will cover how you can enroll a participant in a storyline. To learn more about how to design a new storyline or edit an existing one, see the following article: Creating & Updating a Storyline
Jump to:
- Enrolling a Participant in a Storyline via Mosio
- Enrolling a Participant in a Storyline via REDCap
- Enrolling a Participant in a Storyline via an SMS Survey
Enrolling a New Participant in a Storyline via Mosio
New Participants
You may enroll a new participant into an existing storyline by first entering the Mosio project dashboard that contains the storyline. From your Mosio project dashboard, click on the name of the storyline you would like to enroll a participant in.
This will bring you to the "Enrollment and Monitor" page for the selected storyline. Along with fields for enrolling a new participant, folks who have been enrolled in this time will appear underneath the "Monitor" header.
The "Enroll" section of this page will allow us to specify participant details that we may want to capture when enrolling them into a timeline. Three fields will appear by default - "Phone", "Ppt Id", and "Start Date". In addition to these three fields, any custom project variables will appear. In the example project we're displaying in screenshots, these custom project variables are "Coordinator" and "Discharge Date".
"Start Date" will default to today's date. It is used to determine the timeline in which alerts and surveys are sent out.
To enroll a new participant in the storyline, enter values into the fields listed. Project variables may be left blank.
Once all the required fields have values, clicking the "Add User" button will enroll the participant into a storyline.
Once enrolled, that new participant will appear on the "Monitor" portion of the page.
Existing Contacts
If a contact has already been added to your Mosio project, you may also add them to a storyline without re-entering their information. To add an existing contact to a storyline, you can start by accessing the project dashboard and clicking on the "total contacts" text on the Contacts tile.
This page provides an overview of all your participant's information and what storylines they're currently enrolled in.
On the left-hand side of this table, you may click off the checkboxes to select which participants you would like to add to a storyline.
After you have selected the records you would like to add to a storyline, you can click the "Add Group To Story" text towards the bottom of the table.
This will cause a pop-up window to appear with a few fields. The first shows how many participants were selected, and the other two will be used to designate which storyline these participants are being assigned to, and what start date will be assigned for these participants.
A dropdown for selecting a storyline to add the participants to will also be available.
If you have a storyline with an alert or survey sending on Day 0, the user interface will alert you of this.
After you have made the desired selections for these fields, click the blue "Add Participants" button.
You will now see the name of the storyline listed in the participant's "Storylines" column on the contact list.
Enrolling a Participant in a Storyline via REDCap
It is also possible to enroll a participant to a storyline via REDCap using Mosio's "%Tags%" feature. To start, we will want to determine the ID number associated with your storyline. To do this, you will want to start by navigating to your storyline's enroll and monitor page. From your Mosio project dashboard, click on the name of the storyline you want to enroll the participant in.
This will bring you to the "Enrollment and Monitor" page for the selected storyline. To retrieve the ID, look to the URL of the current page. Copy the value after the "user_overview/" portion of the URL. In the following example, its 63905.
Once the storyline ID has been identified, open your REDCap project. From any page of your REDCap project, click on the "Alerts & Notifications" hyperlink, underneath the "Applications" heading.
On the new page, press the "+ Add New Alert" button.
NOTE: This guide will not detail the process of creating an Alert in-depth. For more information on how to configure an alert, see the Alerts & Notifications article. However, this guide will still cover the steps of constructing this alert.
In the new pop-up menu, define any REDCap based logic that you would like to evaluate before adding a participant to a storyline. In the REDCap project used in this guide, there is a Yes/No field titled storyline1_bin, where [storyline1_bin]='1' indicates that the participant should be enrolled in the storyline referenced above.
In Step 2 of the example alert, "When to send the alert?" was set to "Send immediately" to ensure we have a near real-time enrollment into the storyline. For "Send how many times?", "Just once" has been selected to prevent additional attempts to enroll the same participant in the storyline.
For "Alert Type", SMS has been selected. The recipient phone number should be the number that you will be using to use SMS communications with the participant.
In the body of the message, the first line should be the text "%notext%". This lets Mosio know that this should NOT appear as a text message for the participant.
The following formatting will be what is used to indicate which storyline a participant is enrolled in:
%storyline:storyline_id:[date_field]%
Where:
- "storyline" is a static word that will not be modified
- "storyline_id" is replaced with the storyline ID we retrieved from Mosio
- "datetime_field" is replaced with a REDCap field that will be used to determine storyline start date. This field MUST be validated in YMD or DMY format in REDCap.
In our example, we're using a field named [start_date] in REDCap to determine the start_date. The final message will look like this:
Clicking the green "Save" button will finalize this setup process.
Whenever the defined logical condition is met within REDCap, a participant will now be placed within the specified Mosio storyline.
As a final note, alerts set to create storylines can also be used to fill in a Mosio project variables. The following article covers how to use these tags: Project Variables
If you were to include a Mosio project variable in an alert, you would want to include this somewhere on a different line within the alert.
Enrolling a Participant in a Storyline via an SMS Survey (Question Action)
Mosio's survey functionality may also be used to enroll participants in a storyline through a "Question Action".
After a field has been created on a Mosio survey, you will have the ability to add a Question Action. To begin adding a question action to a new field or an existing field, click on the yellow "Edit" button that appears underneath the field type for that question.
After editing has been enabled, a green "Add Question Action" button can now be clicked.
This will generate a new series of fields, including an "Action" dropdown. This defaults to "Save answer".
From the dropdown, select "Storyline Add".
This will generate two additional fields - a "Storyline Name" dropdown menu, and a "Start Date" text field.
The "Storyline Name" dropdown can be used to select any existing Storyline configured in your Mosio project.
The "Start Date" field will determine the participant's start date in the selected storyline. The word 'today' can be placed in this field if you would like the start date to default to the date of the participant's response to the selected question. A date may also be defined by a custom project variable or manual input.
Clicking the "Update" button will finalize the addition of this question action.
Once these settings have been selected and saved, the defined survey question can trigger the addition of a participant to a storyline.
Next Up
Learn more about setting up reminders to notify participants of upcoming appointments in Configuring Appointment Reminders.