User Guide
This guide walks practitioners through everyday use of HCW@Home: signing in, creating a follow-up, inviting participants, running a video consultation and closing the file afterwards.
It describes the practitioner portal. Patients and external guests use a separate, simplified application — see What participants see.
Follow-ups and appointments
Two objects structure the whole platform. Understanding the difference makes everything else obvious.
| Follow-up | Appointment | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A file that groups everything shared with a beneficiary | A single meeting at a date and time |
| Contains | Appointments, chat messages, shared documents | Participants, a video room or a place |
| Lifetime | Stays open until you close it | Ends when the meeting is over |
| Chat | Yes, before, during and after the appointments | Only through its follow-up |
| PDF export | Yes | — |
A follow-up can contain several appointments — an initial consultation, then a check-up two weeks later — and the chat history stays available between them.
Always work inside a follow-up
Creating a bare appointment from the Calendar menu is possible, and the platform attaches a temporary follow-up to it so its chat works — but that file closes on its own shortly after the meeting. For any real care relationship, create a follow-up and schedule the appointment inside it.
Beneficiaries, guests and colleagues
Everyone you invite falls into one of two categories:
- Existing account — someone who already has an account on the platform: a registered patient, or a colleague. They sign in normally and keep their history.
- Temporary guest — someone with no account. The platform creates a temporary identity for them, reachable through a personal link, an email or an SMS. No real name is required: any identifier you can recognise is enough.
When your administrator has configured a retention delay, temporary guests and their data are removed automatically once the follow-up is closed.