IRT Commandment #3

Thou Shall Not Conflate Visit Date & Transaction Date…or Reconcile Them

In IRT, few misunderstandings create more noise — or more reconciliation work — than confusing Visit Dates with Transaction Dates. Too much time, too much money, and too many human hours are spent trying to force these two dates to match, as if difference automatically implies error.

It doesn’t.

Let’s Level-Set the Definitions

Visit Date
When the patient shows up and the site conducts clinical activities.
This is the clinical timeline.

Transaction Date
When the IRT action occurs; randomization, allocation, acknowledgement of shipment, etc.
This is the system timeline.

They live in different domains for a reason. One reflects the patient’s reality; the other reflects the system’s record of operational actions. They can both be accurate even when they’re not the same.

Trying to force alignment is like trying to make EDC and IRT identical — and that brings us right back to Commandment #1 (https://www.irtadvisorsgroup.com/unblinded/irt-commandment-1).

They’re built for different jobs.

A Legacy Problem With a Long Shadow

IRT doesn’t manage visits — it manages IMP allocation for visits. But the industry’s early language (“visit-based IRT”) created expectations that have never fully gone away. The genie is out of the bottle, and it refuses to climb back in.

So teams inevitably ask:

“Why is the IRT visit date wrong?”

And that’s where the unnecessary work begins:

• Extra data fields “just to be safe”

• New integration rules

• Reconciliation loops that were never needed

All to fix a “problem” that isn’t actually a problem.

The Modern Misstep

To address the confusion, some vendors now store two dates inside IRT:

• Transaction Date

• Visit Date, which is just a direct copy of Transaction Date waiting to be corrected… ugh

This subtly reinforces the wrong idea that the IRT should be a place to manage visit dates.

It shouldn’t. That’s EDC territory.

There are far better uses of time, budget, and cognitive energy than trying to reconcile dates that were never meant to align in the first place.

Understanding the distinction helps simplify integrations, reduce reconciliation, and prevent IRT from becoming a shadow EDC — which leads us to Commandment 4.

Next up: Commandment 4 — Thou Shall Limit EDC Data Point Integrations