A subject is any being that is receiving care from a care team within a department. If you were a hospital, a subject would be one of your patients. It is important to note that a person may be receiving care from multiple departments at any one time. Some of those departments may, for example, be from the same hospital, but they do not necessarily have to be. For example, a child could be receiving care for breathing problems while also using m.Care to work on their issues with cortical visual impairment.
So, said again, a person can be a subject in more than one department at a time.
As a care team member, you can think of the subjects in your department as your patients. As an employer using m.Care for an employee wellness campaign, you might think of subjects as your employees. As a teacher of the visually impaired, your subjects may be the students you are working with in your m.Care classroom. Patients, employees and students all have a common attribute… they are the ones who are being cared for by care team members. Fortunately, m.Care allows you to name these groups whatever you want by way of the Terminology page of your department notebook.
Unique Identifiers
Along with a name, addresses and phone numbers, subjects also always have some sort of unique identifier associated with them. The patient may have a medical record number, an employee would have an employee ID and a student might have a student ID. These Unique Identifiers are used to uniquely identify the subject in the department. m.Care also allows you to name these unique identifiers whatever you want using the department notebook’s terminology page.
To become a subject of a department, a subject must be enrolled. Enrollment can be done by a care team member or by an automatic process depending on the environment in use for m.Care.
Subject States
Once a subject has been enrolled into a department, that subject can be found to be in one of 3 states:
- Active – The subject is receiving services from the care team in the department
- Deactivated – The subject at one time was receiving services by the care team in the department but no longer is.
- Suspended – The subject is still active, but the monitoring plans affecting the subject have been disconnected until the subject is no longer suspended.
The user interface of the monitor allows the care team member with sufficient authority to change the state of the subjects within the department.
A patient can be activated and deactivated multiple times. Each activation creates a new ‘Activation Record’. There is only one activation record that is active for a patient at any given time. If that patient were to be deactivated, the current “activation record” is found and the expiration date and reason for deactivation are filled into that record. At the point, the patient is considered “Deactivated”.
Now, if that patient came back, you would activate them again. In so doing, a brand new activation record would be created (the old one is not lost… it’s still there) and the new activation record would show the new start date. The “expiration date” would not be set on that record. If the patient deactivated again, the same rules would apply… find the current activation, set the expiration date and save the deactivate reason in the subject_activation record.