There are several mechanisms built into the m.Care platform that allow patients to be connected with family and friends. The kind of connection made is dependent on the relationship that the patient is trying to establish with the family member or friend.

In some cases, family members or friends may be acting as care givers for the patient. A care giver is someone who is not a member of the local care team but who works outside of the hospital/health care environment as an assistant in providing the patient care. An example of a care giver in m.Care might be a son who is helping his elderly mother recover from a surgical procedure. In this example, the mother is the patient and the son is the care giver.

Care givers are special! They provide assistance to their loved ones often out of the goodness of their heart. They can help remind family members when to take medications, go to appointments, etc. The m.Care application understands these relationships and places tools into the hands of the patient, the caregiver and the care team to work together on the assisting the patient with their medical issues.

HIPAA rules play an important role in establishing how connections to caregivers may be performed. HIPAA rules indicate that a patient must grant access rights to a caregiver before the caregiver can see the patient’s medical/health data. Many times, in a hospital setting, HIPAA paperwork is filed with the care team to help identify which family members have been given rights to a patient health data.

In other situations, establishing those rights may be a bit more challenging. What if the patient is incapacitated at the moment that the care team needs to converse with the family about the patient’s care?

In m.Care, we have created a method of connecting the patient with their caregivers, but we leave the control of the creation of this relationship in the hands of the care team. Tools with the monitor application help the care team connect family members to patient data. This way, the care team can ensure that only appropriate family members receive this access. This also gives the care team the ability to assign rights to family members in the event a patient is incapacitated.

Granting Rights to a Family member

Care team members use the “Family” or “Caregiver” tab within a patient’s notebook to grant access to a family member. First, you’ll need to find the patient in the patient list. Then, you’ll need to navigate to the patient’s notebook. From there, there will be a tab indicating family or caregiver relationships such as is shown below.

In the above screen clip, you can see that 2 family members have been given the rights to see “Test Person2”, aka “the patient”‘s health data. We can click on one of the names listed to see information about that relationship, or we can click the “+” button at the top to add a new caregiver. If you choose to add a caregiver, you will see the following dialog box. Basically, just type in the name and contact information for the caregiver.

When you enter a caregiver, they will be given a user ID and password (or one time code) in order to be able to sign on to the m.Care application. Given that code, when they sign on, they will be presented with a dashboard of tools for managing the patients they care for.

There is really only one additional setting on the caregiver tab to think about and that’s the dashboard. The dashboard you choose reflects the kind of data that will be shared with the caregiver. Usually, there is only one or two to choose from, but you’ll need to pick one when you enroll the caregiver. The correct dashboard should be obvious based on it’s name.

Once you’ve entered information into the above fields, click Save. The system will create the caregiver an account and return you back to the caregiver list. The system may also optionally automatically send user id and password credentials to the caregiver. If you need to see those credentials, simply click on the caregiver’s name to see the user ID, password and /or one time code that the caregiver can then use to sign on to the system.