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How To Use SmartScripts For Trip Reports In Oracle Siebel CTMS

Starting in Siebel IP2013, a little known enhancement was introduced in Oracle’s clinical trial management system (CTMS): the ability to incorporate Siebel SmartScripts directly into trip reports.

What are SmartScripts?

According to Oracle’s official documentation, “Siebel SmartScript allows business analysts, call center managers, and Siebel developers to create scripts to define the application workflow for interactive customer communications. The script determines the flow of the interaction, not the agent or customer.”

In essence, SmartScripts functions like a decision tree that automatically tailors the dialog between the computer and the user, based on the user’s responses.

How Does a SmartScript Work?

Here’s an example: A SmartScript question could be “Is the caller a doctor or a patient?” The dropdown list of answers would contain either “doctor” or “patient.”

Depending on how the user answered the first question, the next question could be “Is the doctor ordering more refills?”  Or, it could be “Is the patient suffering a medical emergency?”

How Do I Create a SmartScript?

First, you need to create all of your questions and answers (under Administration -SmartScript > Questions):

Because Siebel supports a variety of languages, the Translations tab is where users will see the questions:

And the Answers tab is where you define the answers choices available to the user for each question:

Next, you organize your questions into pages and define the first question for each page (under Administration -SmartScript > Pages):

Next, you use the Designer tab under Pages to organize the flow of the questions on each page:

Finally, under Administration -SmartScript > Script), you organize your pages into a script:

How Do I Associate a SmartScript with a Trip Report Template?

Simply navigate to Administration-Clinical > Trip Report Templates, select a trip report template, open the pick applet in the SmartScript field, and select the SmartScript:

What Will Users Experience While Completing a SmartScript-Enhanced Trip Report?

When completing a trip report that has an associated SmartScript, users will experience the benefits while using the Visit Report Questions tab. The SmartScript is hidden behind the Answer button:

After clicking the Answer button, this is what the user will see:

There is much more to SmartScripts than what we covered in today’s post, but I hope it was enough to give you a better understanding of how the functionality can be leveraged to create dynamic trip report questionnaires. One of the best features of SmartScripts is that the setup, deployment, and maintenance over time is all handled through the user interface without needing any system downtime.

Want to discuss additional uses of SmartScripts? Drop us a line!

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Rene Schmidt

With 20 years of life sciences experience and 10 of working with Siebel, Rene is a Lead Technical consultant @ Perficient. Originally from Montreal, PQ, Rene now resides in Augusta, GA.

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