Overview
The LST m.Care platform has been extended to support a new type of interaction that will greatly benefit your patients and their families and friends… caregiver support.
The m.Care platform recognizes the valuable role friends and family play in helping the ill recover or make progress on their healthcare journey. In the past, the platform has supported the notion of friends and family and allowed patients the chance to invite family members to be part of their care. Included in the platform was a friends and family applet, which could be used by the patient to grant authority to friends and family, so that they too could use the app to work with the patient on their healthcare goals.
The new caregiver support takes the concept of friends and family to the next level, offering extended support for the caregiver, and adds a new social construct for interacting with friends.
In m.Care, caregivers are those individuals that assist an ill family member along their healthcare path. The new Friends feature allows patients to interact with other patients or friends, who area also using the m.Care platform, as a method of encouraging each other to improve their overall wellness.
Caregiving
A caregiver is a non-medical individual who watches over and assists a friend or family member in their healthcare tasks. A caregiver may help a patient remember when to take their medications, assist a patient in getting to and from an appointment, enter data for a patient to be relayed to the care team, etc. Caregiving can be extremely challenging, especially when working with someone who is critically ill. A classic example might be a mom who provides care
to one of her children. Still another might be an adult child of an ill parent.
The m.Care platform now includes tools to help make the caregivers life a little bit easier, while also protecting the HIPAA rights of the patient. These tools can be used to help the caregiver work with the patient, but can also be used to extend assistance to the caregiver as they deal with a potentially difficult situation.
When a caregiver uses m.Care, they are presented with a dashboard that has been customized to fit the needs of the caregivers. There are tools for helping them assist their patients, but also tools specifically for them. A caregiver might receive educational material that is specific to providing care for the patients they assist. They might receive motivational materials to help them keep going on their own journey. They can receive text messages of encouragement and they can even communicate directly with the care team that is assisting their patient.
Caregivers come in all shapes and sizes and can differ in their responsibilities towards the patient as well. Some caregivers may be involved in the day-to- day caregiving with their patients where others may be only occasionally involved or perhaps involved from a more remote location. The m.Care platform supports all of these models of caregiving.