What Is New at the UF IRB? IRB Best Practices and Changes to Documents and Templates

The UF Institutional Review Board (IRB) offers three best practices designed to keep your studies and submissions running smoothly.

1. E-mailing your study participants? Services like REDCap can do so securely.
2. Need documents stamped by the IRB? Use Microsoft Word or PDFs to keep things moving.
3. Want to be sure your study is heard at a specific Full Board meeting? Pay close attention to meeting deadline updates.

In addition, UF IRB has recently updated some of its documents. Please be sure to download the latest versions from the IRB Policies, Guidelines, and Guidances webpage and double-check that you are using the most up-to-date copy. Some Smart Forms also have been redesigned. For more information, please see Smart Forms: What does the IRB look for?

IRB Best Practices: E-mailing study participants, documents stamped by the IRB, and Full Board deadlines

1. E-mailing your study participants? Services like REDCap can do so securely.

Study teams at UF frequently communicate with study subjects via e-mail for things like scheduling appointments, sending out questionnaires, and providing compensation. While using e-mail services like Microsoft Outlook can be convenient, problems may arise when teams need to communicate with multiple participants all at once. Teams often use Outlook’s ‘bcc’ function to communicate with groups of participants all at once, but confidentiality breaches can occur if subjects are ‘cc’d’ instead of ‘bcc’d.’ For this reason, we strongly recommend against sending mass e-mails to study subjects using bcc. The good news is that UF offers a variety of tools, such as REDCap, that can help teams securely communicate with their subjects. If you want to learn more about e-mail and messaging tools for communicating with participants, check out Integrated Risk Management’s Fast Path Solutions.

2. Need documents stamped by the IRB? Use Microsoft Word or PDFs to keep things moving.

Teams are required to have recruitment materials and informed consent documents stamped by the IRB prior to use, and the IRB stamps hundreds of documents for the UF research community each week. Although we strive to return documents and approval materials to teams in a timely manner, currently our approval team is only able to stamp documents in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) format or PDFs. Submitting your documents in Word or PDF format can speed the process of getting things approved!

3. Want to be sure your study is heard at a specific Full Board meeting? Pay close attention to meeting deadline updates.

IRB staff and reviewers know that time can be at a premium in the research world. To help accommodate our study teams, IRB staff will sometimes bump up studies scheduled for a later Full Board meeting to one happening sooner. However, it’s important to note that Full Board meetings often fill up quickly, which means that there is limited or no room to bump up studies from later meetings. The best way to make sure your study is heard at a given meeting, then, is to make sure the submission is turned into the IRB by the meeting deadline. You can find meeting deadlines on our website: IRB-01 and IRB-02. Although we’ll always do our best to accommodate scheduling requests, it’s not always possible for us to do so, and studies submitted before the deadline have priority for scheduling.