Your use of the monitor will improve if you take the time to understand just a few basic concepts.

When we built the monitor, we understood one really important concept…. A group of individuals watching over another group for health considerations may define “healthy behavior” differently than another group. As an example, if the monitor were to be used within a cardiology clinic, the concepts of what is healthy behavior might be the nutrition and exercise program a person is on as well as their adherence to their medication regiment. Fluctuations in those behaviors may, for the caridologist, define a difference between whether a person is “being healthy” or “not being healthy”.

The definition of healthy behavior as defined by the cardiologist above may not be the same set of behaviors in use to measure healthy behavior within, say the oncology department where it may be more about infection control and adherence to a regiment of chemotherapy.

As you can see from the above, the definition of healthy behavior varies. To support the ability to let any group use the monitor regardless of what they consider healthy behavior, we have constructed the monitor so that it can be configured in any way needed to support that definition of healthy. For example, a cardiologist may decide that since nutrition and exercise are important, those features should be “turned on” for their patient population, but the oncologist might feel that turning on the exercise module may be too much for their patient population. The monitor allows for this kind of configuration so that you can monitor any way you want or need to help your subjects.

When you begin to use the Monitor, one of the first things done is to create something we call a “department“. A department is a group of care team members that are planning to watch over a set of patients together to help those patients achieve certain healthy behaviors.

There can be any number of different departments set up within the monitor. A care team member can work in many different departments and a patient can receive services from any number of departments. Typically though, we try to define a department along the lines of a group of people who are working together to help a patient population behave in a healthy manner as defined by the department. Further, when you start off, it is very common to use only a single department to get started.

After you create a department, you then may begin to invite people to join you and work within the department. When you invite a person to become a care team member in a department department, you use features within the monitor to send that teammate an invitation and this invitation allows the teammate to decide whether or not they want to join the department. If the team member accepts the invitation they will be made a member of the department. So, said another way, a department allows a group of people to become members and once a member, a person will be able to work with the data and subjects of the department.

The monitor defines a subject as a person who is receiving services and being watched over by members of a department. More traditionally, in a hospital, a subject might be called a “patient”. But, because the monitor program is used in traditional health care, corporate wellness, school systems, etc, we chose the term “Subject” as the default name of these individuals. But, since the monitor is configurable, one of the things you can do is change the terminology to reflect the needs of your department. So, for example, you can, using the monitor, change the term “Subject” to “Patient” so that your terminology is what is in use across the monitoring application.

In fact, many of the terms used by the monitor can be overridden to use the terms you are most comfortable using. For example, maybe you don’t want to call your “department” a “department” and instead want to call it a “Group”. Totally fine! You can use the “terminology” set up section of the monitor to change the terms to match the needs of your business.

So then, to refresh… a department has members that watch over and provide services to a set of subjects.

We saw previously that by way of an invitation, a person can become a member, but how does a subject become connected with a department? Within the monitor, you may manually enroll a person to allow them to become a subject (patient). Depending on other considerations you may also have people automatically enrolled as subjects/patients in your departments by way of the integration we provide. As an example, our system supports receiving files of enrollment data from an external system an upon receipt, the people listed in the file can be automatically enrolled as subjects within your department.

If you don’t have the mechanisms in place to automatically enroll a person as a subject, don’t worry! The monitor makes this easy. Typically, you just fill out the basic demographics of the person you wish to enroll, save that information, and the person will become a subject within the department.

Many of the features of a department are configurable using the tools available in the m.Care monitor. The configuration is protected by user rights and authority and those rights are set up by the department manager.

Next, let’s get into more details about the definition of a department and the department manager.