💡 What is a Cohort?
A cohort in Rivia is a subset of patients defined by mixing patient characteristics (e.g., Arm, Age) with events across multiple clinical domains. This is what makes cohorts powerful: in a single definition, you can combine attributes like Arm or Age with findings from Adverse Events, Exposures, Medical History, and more. For a full walkthrough, see Cohorts.
🎯 Goal
In this guide, you will learn how to organize cohorts into folders, reuse them across dashboards, and assign view or edit permissions to control who can access them.
Overview
As your study grows, so does the number of cohorts. Folders and permissions help you keep things tidy and make sure the right people have the right level of access.
With this feature, you can group related cohorts into folders, move cohorts between folders, reuse them in dashboards, and assign view or edit permissions per cohort.
Here are some questions that you can answer by organizing cohorts:
How do I quickly find the cohorts I use most often?
How do I allow my team to use a cohort without letting them change it?
How do I separate safety cohorts from efficacy cohorts?
Creating folders and moving cohorts
From the Cohorts page, click + New Folder and give it a name that reflects the topic or owner (e.g., "Safety Review", "Rivia's Cohorts").
Folders can be:
Nested, to reflect sub-topics (e.g., "Safety Review > SAEs").
Renamed, moved, or deleted from the folder menu.
Favorited, so they appear at the top of the list and of every cohort selector.
To move cohorts into a folder:
One cohort: open the cohort menu and select Move.
Multiple cohorts: select them from the list and click the blue Move button that appears at the top of the list.
Click the ⭐ icon on any cohort to mark it as a favorite. Favorited cohorts are pinned to the top of all cohort selection views, making it easy to quickly access the ones you reuse across dashboards.
ℹ️ Tip: mirror the folder logic you already use for dashboards. A consistent structure across cohorts and dashboards makes navigation easier!
Assigning permissions
Three roles are available:
Owner: can view a cohort, edit it, and manage who else has access to it.
Editor: can view and edit a cohort, but cannot change its permissions.
Viewer: can only view a cohort and use it in dashboards, but cannot edit it.
If you have the Owner role for a cohort, click Manage Access in the cohort builder to assign or change permissions for other users.
👪 Every user has at least Viewer access to every cohort by default. This avoids broken dashboards caused by hidden cohort filters.
ℹ️ Note: permissions apply to individual cohorts, not to folders. Moving a cohort between folders does not change who can access it.
Using cohorts in dashboards and panels
When selecting a cohort in a dashboard or panel, you will see the same folder structure present on the Cohorts module, with pinned folders and favorited cohorts surfacing first.
Permissions carry over, too. You can use any cohort, but only the cohorts where you are an Editor or Owner can be edited directly from the dashboard or panel view.
Tracking where a cohort is used
If you try to delete a cohort that is referenced by one or more dashboards and panels, Rivia will block the deletion and show an alert. This prevents them from breaking due to a missing cohort.
 |
Best practices
🗂 Group by purpose, not by author. Topic-based folders scale better than per-user folders as the team grows.
📌 Pin the folders you use the most. One click to the cohorts you rely on daily.
⭐ Favorite your go-to cohorts. They will surface first in every selector.
🔒 Keep Viewer as the default. Promote to Editor or Owner only for the people responsible for maintaining the cohort definition.