Documentation

CheckTick is an open source project for clinicians to run surveys, audits or research, especially in the UK.

The average clinician in the NHS has plenty of research ideas, quality improvement or audit project opportunities, but most will not have any departmental money to spend on carrying them out. If any of these involve running a survey that involves patients, the only platforms that can host them sit within Universities and are out of reach for the average person running a small project in their spare time.

For clinicians doing surveys or questionnaires that don't involve sensitive patient data, still the available solutions are not tailored to health care.

CheckTick meets all these needs. It allows users to build their own questions from a range of question types, including a range of prebuilt question groups. For example, if you are surveying doctors and you want to know where they work, you can use the Professional Details - fields prepopulated with all the hosital trusts in the UK. Need an input that validates an NHS Number or postcode? You can use the custom Patient Details group. CheckTick supports hundreds of NHS Dictionary datasets besides, all with standard names and values; from standardised lists of blood groups, to ethnicities to medical specialities. Users can publish their own lists to share with others, or Organisation users can build their own lists specific to where they work.

Suppose you are doing a research project which includes asking an already published and validated questionnaire? Do you have to enter all those questions and answer options again? With CheckTick some of these are already hosted by CheckTick - any validated, published group of questions (subject to copyright), for example the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), can be dropped into a survey. No need to enter all those questions in again. And you can publish your own for others to use. Browse the library to see what is there, and contribute your own to save other's time and to make sure your questionnaire is used.

There are a range of different was to create surveys. Most users are familiar with builders where questions types are dragged onto a canvas. CheckTick offers this together with branching where users can change the questions offered based on previous answers. But CheckTick also has a Text Editor - users can type the questions in as a list, or paste them in from somewhere else to create a survey. Or, use the AI Assistant which can suggest questions and generate the survey automatically.

In the NHS it is important that survey creators reach all patients, irrespective of language or disability - CheckTick surveys meet the rigorous WCAG AA accessibility standards, and can be published instantaneously in 12 different languages.

For people looking to integrate CheckTick into an existing workflow there is an API.

CheckTick takes data and data governance very seriously. As the custodian of patient data, CheckTick complies with the key UK and NHS standards:

• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
• UK Data Protection Act 2018
• NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit
• Caldicott Principles
• Research ethics requirements

Data is encrypted and accessible only by those with the correct permissions. A comprehensive logging and audit trail keeps track of who accessed the data, and maintains data integrity. No data leaves the UK - all information is stored on UK servers.

If your workflow prefers API access - there is a full suite of endpoints for survey creation and consumption, all with the same security principles. And if your research demands your own instance, consider self-hosting or talk to us about hosting an instance for you on the enterprise tier. CheckTick can be customised to change themes, logos and colours at platform level, at organisation level, and even at individual survey level.

CheckTick has been designed and built for clinicians working in the NHS. The CheckTick team want to foster a community of users that want to build surveys to learn more about the the services they run and the patients they serve. The documentation is comprehensive but can always be improved. If you have any suggestions, or if you want to get involved in making CheckTick better, please see the guidelines on how to contribute.