We’re getting rid of pools because discussions in our group confirmed their overall uselessness in the new system – they are insufficiently granular. The only reason to have pools is that people used to enter patients into the system and then forgot to enroll them into the study, so that these guys were in limbo, and the only way to fetch them back was through some kind of categorization.  In the new system, which you can beta-test on

http://128.36.123.103/act_db/login.aspx

the demographics and enrollment info are two different tabs/panels on a single Web page, and there is no possibility of saving one kind of data without saving the other (the system automatically performs an insert into the patient_study table when you save a new patient’s demographics, and makes that patient the current patient).

Pools are now being superseded in favor of projects- in circumstances where you have a set of patients who can be in multiple studies, you create a project, add studies to the project, designate one of the studies as a core study (to store common information that is needed by the other studies- this is accessible from other studies), and add demographics only within the core study. When a new study is added to the project, you can bulk-enroll multiple patients from the core study into one of these studies.