Family Management

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One of the most important things in life is the health and safety of one's family. Just like any corporate health plan, these benefits extend to an employee's family. As we transitioned from an individual focused product, we needed to allow patients to add their family members to their plan. As well, parents need a way to get medical care for their children without having their records mixed up.

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People want to be able to extend the benefits of Dialogue to their family. By allowing them to add and manage their family accounts, they're able to provide their family with easy access to Dialogue, and to consult with their children

Adding family members

Adding a family member to their plan, by inviting them through a email. The primary account holder (in this case the employee that is covered under their corporate plan) is the only one able to add and remove people from their plan.

Managing the healthcare of a child

A child's healthcare is taken care of by a parent or a guardian as they grow up. They're responsible for taking their child to doctor appointments, understanding a diagnosis, and following any instructions they receive from a doctor. As they get older, the responsibility falls to the child to manage their own healthcare. The distinction is a legal one:

• Children under the age of 14 are required to have a guardian present for all medical appointments (which means that guardian has to have access to and manage the child's medical information).
• Once they're 14, a guardian is not required, and the consent of the child is needed for other people to be present at any medial appointment

For Dialogue, this meant:

• Having parents access the child's medical information and consult on their behalf (either from the same account, or be able to access their child's account)
• The child's account and medical information needs to be separated from their guardian's and only accessible by the child.

Adding a child

Adding a child is similar to the initial onboarding process when a patient downloads Dialogue. They fill out a profile with some basic information, then take a photo of the healthcare card (or a form of ID) so we can verify the identity of the child.

Chats with children

We had two main choices here, either to separate out the chats completely and have the parent switch accounts when they need to access a child's records, or to combine the two and clearly indicate which patient each chat thread is associated with. After talking to our medical team, we decided on the second approach to allow guardians to easily access both accounts, and to allow the medical team to see both accounts together.

This allows guardians to quickly find what they're looking for and to start a chat about a new concern all in one place, without having to switch context all the time and inevitably mixing up the accounts.

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