useR! 2024

The presentation will be a brief tutorial about a new released R package in CRAN called {flowchart} to create participant flow diagrams directly from a dataframe (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/flowchart/index.html). In health research, a patient flowchart is the best way to show the flow of participants in a study when reporting results as stated by the CONSORT guideline (https://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c332.long). There are several packages in R for drawing flowcharts using different approaches but generally the programming is quite complex and the numbers need to be manually entered or parameterized beforehand. This new package uses a different approach integrated into the tidyverse framework. It allows you to create many different types of flowcharts in an easy and much more reproducible way because it automatically adapts to the data. This means we don’t have to manually set the flowchart parameters, such as the box coordinates or the numbers to display . The main idea behind the package is to create flowcharts from an initial dataset by combining different basic functions with the pipe operator (\|\> or %\>%).