The News applet presents a list of articles that may be of interest to a subject. A subject is allowed to follow categories of news that may be of interest to them. They can review, like and comment on articles that they find of interest.

News articles are created by the care teams. When a news article is created, the care team member specifies a title for the article, provides a written synopsis and a graphic for the article and decides which categories best suite the article, and finally they publish the article for their subjects to review.

Publishing Articles

The monitor’s News application is used to publish articles to the community. To get started, a care team member navigates to the monitors “News List” app. The news list presents to the care team, articles that have been developed by team members in their department. You can use this view to examine which articles are currently being displayed to your subjects or to examine previously written articles that you may wish to re-publish to the subjects.

From the News list, you may press the “+” button to add a new article, or you can click on an existing article in the provided list by clicking the articles title. Doing either presents the news article editor page which allows you to enter in information about your news article.

In the above picture of the news article editor, you can see that there are several fields available to help you describe your article. All articles should always:

• Have a title
• Have a synopsis
• Have a graphic (256×256 in size)
• Be placed in a category

In the screen clip above, you can see that the article is entitle Apple and that it was written by “Me” and the content for the article will be found in a referenced URL. The article has kind of a silly picture of a shield associated with it.

Content Types

Articles can have different kinds of content. The following are the supported content types:

• URL
• Typed In
• Start an Applet

The content type tells the news reader where the content referenced by the title and synopsis and graphic comes from. If you chose URL, then the content will reference a URL for display. If you choose Inline, the content will be typed by you into a word processor on the news editor site. If you select Start an Applet, then the content will actually be an applet and will be started by the system when the user taps the news article.

The following screen shot shows the article editor page when you select that the content type is “Typed In”

The following screen shot shows the article editor after you’ve indicated you want the article to start an applet when clicked. In this contrived example, when someone clicks on the Apple article, the Allergies applet would start.

Categories

The monitor application allows you to place news articles into one or more categories. Say, for example, you were writing on how to eat healthy and in so doing, felt the article was beneficial to patients following the diabetes AND the COPD category. No problem! Just connect the article to both categories and it will be available to either group. Note then that this means an article could appear twice to a user if they were to follow both categories. That’s ok and is expected.

To connect an article to a category, use the category tab at the bottom of the article editor display. Select a category from the drop down list of available categories and click Assign. Or, create a new category by clicking the “+” button next to the category drop down list.

Creating a new Category

You can create your own category, and when you do, you’ll be prompted for a category name and whether or not the category is required for your subject to see. If you do not require the category, that the subjects will only see the articles you post to the category if they are following the category.

Publishing your Article

News articles can be published to your subjects, but you have the chance of preparing the article before it is published. You can save it, get it just right, and then finally decide when to release it. You release the article by clicking the Publish button in the Publish section of the news article editor.

When you click publish, the article will become available to all subjects following the categories you’ve placed the article in. The article will stay visible to those subjects until you decide to hide the article or at the expiration date you specify for the article.

In the following screen clip, you can see that the article has been published and will disappear from view on 4/1/2020. You could optionally click the “Hide Article” button and immediately hide the article from view if necessary.

Article Statistics and Comments

When a subject reads an article, they have tools to indicate whether they enjoyed the article. You can also optionally allow comments to be made on the article as well. Turn on user comments by clicking on the Option tab and checking “Allow Comments”.

The system tracks the reaction of the subjects to the article and will show you statistics if you click on the Statistics page of the news article. The stats reflect how well the article has been received by the community.

The comments page allows you to review comments that folks have written about the article. You can use the comments page to review those comments and to, if necessary, flag a comment as inappropriate so that the comment can no longer be seen. If you click the “Flag as Inappropriate” link, the article will be immediately flagged and removed from view the next time the subject refreshes the news applet on their iDevice.

Alerts

The news system integrates with the alert system in the monitor. There are a set of alerts that allow you to track progress with your news article including:

• When people open the article
• When they finish the article
• When they comment on the article

You can set up an alert for a particular article or for all articles read by your subjects.