Departments, Customers and Institutions

When you work with a customer, one of the things you will need to do is determine how they intend to use the m.Care notion of departments, customers and institutions.

To know how to help them get started requires knowledge of what these elements are used for within m.Care.

A department is a logical grouping of care team members to the subject that they provide services for. For the most part, you will start off with 2 departments, one to test with and the other that represents the production data for the customer.

You may find that over time there becomes a need for a customer to have more than one department. The triggers that might suggest the need for more than one department for the customer include:

  1. When you start hearing complicated rules about who is allowed to see which patients. If there are distinct boundaries of care team members that care for different sets of subjects, it may be smart to separate patients into two different departments.
  2. The definition of “healthy” differs for the subjects. As an example, cardiology has different rules of what it means to be healthy then, say, the endocrine department. When the rules start to stand out as significantly different, it may be time to create another department.
  3. If the monitoring plans are totally different for some subset of patients, it may be time to create another department.

Keep in mind that a care team member can work in more than one department. The monitor allows the care team member to switch easily between departments.

A customer basically groups a set of departments together for your convenience. Once a group of departments are all connected to the same customer, they can be more readily found when trying to switch departments. A customer typically means YOUR customer. So, say you have multiple departments all for the Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic should be the customer that all departments for them connect to.

An Institution is used to define the EMR system that groups a collection of departments together. If a set of departments all use the same EMR, they should all use the same Institution.